How do I move large number of former employee mail to vault?

[RhoSysAdmin]

We have a number of former employee email stlil in Exchange 2003.  We've migrated the current users to new Exchange 2010 mailstores.  The fomer employee accounts are disabled.  The former employee user objects are in their own OU and I do have another EV policy to run against them but EV won't archive unless their user accounts are enabled (AFA I've seen).

Is my only recourse to bulk enable a block of "x" former employees at a time and let the EV task run overnight?

This leads to a follow up question.  The reason these former employee mailboxes have not been fully archived is b/c we're required to disable these accounts the moment the employee leaves the building for the last time.  There's no window to allow EV to run against the associated mailboxes.  How does everyone else out there handle vaulting of former employee mailboxes?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!!

[Rob_Wilcox1 · Accepted solution]

You have a few options:

a/ Use our tool called Archive Leavers

b/ Enable the EV registry key to process disabled users:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH76587

[Nate_D1]

With a 0 day archive policy, and enabling the archival of disabled accounts like Rob mentioned above. We follow almost the exact same exit procedures and handle it in this way. Please keep in mind that vault will only archive 1000 items per night, so if the user was especially heavy mail user it may take a few nights to get their entire mailbox archived.  Once the mail is archived you are free to delete the exchange account as well.

[GertjanA]

I've been testing the (free) Archive Leavers tool from Quadrotech, and it works like a charm.

Main advantage is that it archives everything immediately, and removes old shortcuts, effectively leaving you with an empty mailbox. If you are ok using that tool I suggest doing that, as that requires the least amount of effort.

See here: http://www.quadrotech-it.com/products/evtools/free/archive-leavers/ for more information.

[RhoSysAdmin]

Ok, humor me while I ask a question and let me know if I'm overthinking this.

I was considering creating a new vaultstore partition for these former employees.  Most of them have archived email in another EV vaultstore partition already.  Once I enable archiving of disabled users, a new mailbox policy will be applied to these users.  So will all there archived originals move to the new vaultstore or will it remain and just existing non-archived mail get archived to the new vautlstore?

If it's split, is that ok? 

[Rob_Wilcox1]

A new vault store partition won't make any difference.

A new vault store won't either.. just when you re-enable them for archiving they'll end up with a new second archive in the new vault store.

Is that okay?

2 archives?

That's up to you really. I would personally do it that way .. at all.

[RhoSysAdmin]

My apologies Rob, can you clarify your last statement?

"That's up to you really. I would personally do it that way .. at all."

Did you mean to say you would do it this way or you would not?  The "at all" is throwing me a little.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Sorry, yeah I was typing too fast for my little brain to keep up :)

I meant I would NOT do it as you suggested.  Having two archives is just a pain, in my opinion.

[RhoSysAdmin]

Do you ever worry about the partitions getting too big?  All my current vault stores are on LUNs now, but we migrated to NetApp not too long ago so now I'm considering moving all the vaultstores to CIFS shares (a separate discussion altogether). 

My FSA vault store already has three different partitions due to disk space limitations.  My Mbx (aka Exchange) vault store has two different partitions, again due to disk space issues.

If new vault store partitions don't make a difference, and they can't get "too big", then it looks like I should migration my existing vault stores to CIFS first before enabling archiving of disabled users, correct?

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Well we're talking a different issue now, right?

LUN size, and partition rollover, should really be a different forum thread than this one, in my opinion.