Reducing Exchange mailbox size with EV archival ?

[Dushan_Gomez]

Hi All,

Is it possible to reduce the Exchange mailbox size with the EV archival ?

at the moment several of my storage group is almost full (less than 20%) so I wonder if EV can relief the stress on disk space by archving ?

if yes then how to do it for specific storage group only ?

Thanks 

[JesusWept3]

Reducing exchange sizes is one of the main core benefits of enterprise vault For the storage group though, you will have to do an ldap query that lists all the users on that storage group, all the other details of how EV can save space on exchange is all in the documentation

[Dushan_Gomez]

ok, so for example just for once off run, how can I archive selected users on a particular Storage group overnight so that I don't have to interrupt the monthly archive job or start archiving for whole ocmpany mailbox archival ?

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

As JW2 said above, if it is a new install and you want to target specific users first you can build an ldap query and enable those targeted users.  You will want to be mindful of shortcut policy, you would not want to use Full but rather leave only like 500 characters and links to the attachments.  Then you can just let EV run and do its thing.

For an already enabled environment you can do run now's on the archive task and target only the mailboxes you want to archive down.  I would recommend you archive nightly as opposed to monthly however.  You will probably see better results and EV will have a chance to get everyones mailbox under control.  Again, be aware of your shortcut content.

[Dushan_Gomez]

ok, suppose I do it during the business hours, what would be the effect to the users while the archival process working ?

[TonySterling]

If you archive during business hours users might see items in the pending state until your backup runs.  Whilst this is not ideal it isn't a showstopper for most people.  It just takes some user education.  Best practice would be to archive during off hours.

[Dushan_Gomez]

ah cool, many thanks Tony for your reply and explanation.

[Dushan_Gomez]

Tony,

My initial reason not archiving nightly is that the exchange server 2007 full backup itself took around 15 hours to finish (300+ users Mbx over 1 GB vNIC - Virtual machine NIC directly into tape drive), means if I start the backup at 7 PM itwould finish by 10 AM next day, therefore I cannot run the archiving process nightly. 

Most probably I'll find a good time during the weekend timeslot between 10 AM - 7 PM.

[Dushan_Gomez]

OK, I just found out that this is the way Exchange Server 2007 behave, it won't clear up the disk by itself: http://www.msexchange.org/articles/Exchange-Databases-Disk-Consumption.html