Archiving from a very large journal mailbox

[SHI-CRO]

We've got a journal mailbox that has nearly 4.5 million items and is nearly 400GB on an Exchange 2007 server.  We targeted it in EV but never got anything in the archive.

About 1/2 hour later, the mail server broke and was queueing all email, even though processor and memory utilization were very low.  No problem with disk space either.  No errors or warnings in event logs.  We stopped the journal archiving task and rebooted the mail server and it started to work again.

We're a bit scared to try again.  I couldn't think of any reason EV would cause the server to stop working, but it was quite a coinsidence that the server broke soon after EV tried to get email out of that journal mailbox.

Can anyone think of a reason EV would have caused the Exchange server to stop working?  If so, any suggestions on getting the email from this journal mailbox into the archive?

[AndrewB · Accepted solution]

first of all, create a new journal target so no new email is going to that mailbox. second, EV is going to have to scan the entire 4.5MM items/400GB before it will start archiving any data and that will take a very long time. maybe the Exchange server cant handle that? but really, there's nothing i've seen before to indicate that EV caused that issue per se.

consider breaking it up into 4-5 smaller mailboxes at least? there's a few ways you can approach that - let me know if you need some suggestions.

[SHI-CRO]

We did create a new journal mailbox and are archiving from it without issue.  I figured that EV would scan that mailbox, but I didn't expect it to cause problems with the Exchange server.

The mailboxes on that server are scheduled to be migrated to a new mailbox server soon, so we're just going to hold off until the only mailbox left is that journal mailbox and then we'll try again.