Scheduled archiving stops on one Exchange server.

[BruGuy]

Hello,

We have EV8SP5 which is archiving the mailboxes on a few Exchange 2003 servers using mostly Outlook 2003.

I've noticed that our scheduled archiving at night-time doesn't appear to be happening anymore on one Exchange server. The task is still there, it's marked as running and there aren't any event viewer errors. However, I've noticed that there are no archiving logs being produced for that server in the Reports\Archiving directory on the EV server. A couple of users (so far) have also mentioned that the nightly archiving is not working. They can still manually archive however.

The EV mailbox still exists on the Exchange server and hasn't been changed or deactivated. All the EV services are restarted every day. The schedule definition is still ok.

Can anyone please suggest what I should look for?

(Btw this is a different problem to my other recent post about archiving stopping for one user only.)

Thanks,

- Alan.

[Nick_White]

Hi,

can you try doing a run now of the Archiving Task and selecting report mode. This should show all the mailboxes that we can see on the server, whether they are enabled for archiving or not and also the number of items that are ready to be archived. The report should appear in the directory you mentioned in your post. If a report doesn't appear then a Dtrace of archivetask should hopefully provide some clues as to why it is failing.

I'm assuming there are no errors in the event logs for the agent too?

[BruGuy]

I'll do that tomorrow thanks. There are always some errors in the event log (conversions) but nothing new before and after archiving stopped.

[KarlW]

Also check your backup schedule - make sure it doesn't clash with the archiving schedule - otherwise what can happen is all the mailboxes are disgarded after a number of retries from the A5 queue.  So in the morning everything looks good but really it's not done anywork.

Remember the Exchange tasks don't produce archiving reports so you wouldn't expect to see one.

-Karl

[BruGuy · Accepted solution]

Problem appears to have disappeared overnight. Our mailbox provisioning tasks run at midnight, I can see that the prov task for the problem server ran at 7:30pm instead, then everything worked ok. Is there some 18-day timeout or APril 1st special condition? ;)

Thanks to all.

[MarkBarefoot]

As Karl mentioned, it might be worth monitoring the A5 MSMQ - this is where the Scheduled requests are dropped onto. There may have been a backlog as the messages are processed serially, so you get a Process Exchange Server message, and then each mailbox in turn.

We only log when we start the Exchange archiving run in the event log and currently don't produce a report (unless run in report mode)

[BruGuy]

Will do. But our backup is at 6am and archiving for a few hours before/after midnight.

It would be nice if there was at least the opion to always make reports. :)