Archiving mail, does this remove it off the exchange server?

[Smokesembos]

Does archiving mail actually remove the mail off a 2003 sbs server server to a .pst file on the local machine? I've got a few users that have quite big mail boxes that I need to trim down. Unfortunatly I can test it as I'm out of the office at the moment.

Thanks, Arron.

 

[ntinlin]

Sort of.

Mail will be copied to the PST then deleted by the server. However it will go into retained deleted items so you won't get the white space back until your deleted items retention time is up AND server has done an online defrag.

Neill

 

[nell1]

You could save the archive to a folder on the server. That way you trim the Exchange DB but have access to archive email that is backed up.

 

[Smokesembos]

Ok thanks for that, is it 30 days retention on the server by default? The same as storing a deleted users mailbox?

Also the defrag, is that something that you have to kick off manually or is it sheduled to do so anyway?

 

[ntinlin]

Online defrag is pretty automatic, you just decide when you want maintenance to run on a store by store basis.

Note that maintenance will stop while a backup is taking place so best to schedule it for after that.

Once online maintenance has run check for 1221 events in log which will show you how much white space was recovered.

To turn that white space into actual free disk space you'd have to do an offline defrag which is a manual process and only recommended if you are running out of HDD space or getting up to database size limit.

Neill