How to archive selected groups of mailboxes or a better idea needed !
Ladies and Gents, Folk of huge intellect,
a few months ago, we were at last allowed to upgrade our old, tired and struggling EV 7.5 environment to a shiny newish Win 2008 box with lots more storage, lots more RAM and loadsd of processors - Hooray !
Our EV 10.0.3 single server is attached to two exchange 2007 CCR server environments and has about 4500 mailboxes of various types, user, and shared and various sizes. Some grow slowly, some receive vast amounts of mail and attachments.
We use a shared TSM backup environment and the likeliehood of getting a separate TSM backup server is at best, extremely remote. We've fiddled with and tweaked where we can, with the knowledge we have, but cannot add any more hours into a day.
Our archive window runs from 04:00AM to midday. Our tsm backup window is scheduled from 14:00 until it finishes.
Each day, the backup gets greater and greater and takes longer and longer. I've manually rolled over to a new partition when the previous one got to about 750Gb. I intend to roll future partitions over at around 500Gb. (On the old and less powerful 7.5 server I was rolling over to a new paritiion every two weeks or 200Gb, which ever was reached first.)
Our backup is a prooblem. It is not fast and with more data to secure each day, it just gets longer and longer, inevitably overlapping the archive window. This seems to limit how many mailboxes we can archive, to at times only a few hundred.
We have no budget left and I cannot convince those on high to make an exception - ideally a second EV server would be good, but I know I can't have one.
SO... I want to archive a different set of mailboxes each night, as I suspect that at present we are archiving the same ones first and as a result many never get touched.
If you can advise a workable, if manual approach to this or if you have a vastly superior and cost-free idea, I'm all ears !!
Hope you all enjoy the long weekend, if you get one !!