Forum Discussion
Exchange online archive file management help
Hi, I hope someone can lend me a hand. I run a computer service company in a very rural area. Most of my customers are home users with the exception for a few businesses I take care of in my area. On...
Hi Dan,
I did forget to mention that I did archive folders on the users local machines accounts
and saved them to their hard disk and a external backup drive.
Hi, I will follow up with this. since this is an insurance agency I can't just delete the mail. Because of leagle reasons and chances that the mail may be needed in a leagle suit I have to be able to recover mail from possible years ago. The reason i just don't flush it.
- Perhaps I've misunderstood what your issue is. If you have Business Standard licensing, you get a 50Gb mailbox in Exchange Online. Outlook connects to that mailbox in Exchange Online and caches some (or all) of that data locally to provide a better users experience. There is no "local" file or "Cloud archive" file. The cloud mailbox is the file.
If the mailbox is over 50Gb, then you can enable an Online Archive for the mailbox and users can move data to this separate but related mailbox (this can be automated with policies as well). This will give the user an additional 50GB of storage space. The other options is to remove data from the mailbox. You can do this by using the Outlook client to export some messages to PST (you can Google how to do this) or the user can delete messages from their mailbox. If you export to PST you're then left with an issue of how you securely manage these files, so I'd strongly recommend you don't go down this path.
My recommendation is to elevate your licensing to Business Premium, which includes eDiscovery. This allows you to create retention policies so that when users delete messages, they are retained in the tenant. In the event of a legal incident, compliance managers can search and export this data using eDiscovery (please don't think that retention of data is a backup...it most definitely isn't! You can purchase 3rd party services if you want to backup your data).
Hope this helps- Hi Dan,
Thanks again for the help. I guess what is confusing me is when I use the Outlook tools and go to the mailbox clean up. When I click view Mailbox size I have 2 tabs One says local data the other says server The server tab holds these large files. That is what I am trying to backup and remove or make smaller in size.- Forget using that tool. It's not really relevant for cloud based mailboxes. Remember that the local file is just a cache of the mailbox which resides in Exchange Online, and it's the mailbox that is over the limit. The only way to reduce the size of the mailbox is to remove items (ie messages, attachments, calendar entries) from it, and as an admin I wouldn't be deleting items from a mailbox on behalf of users, so generally you put it back on them by saying "Sorry...you've paid for 50Gb of mailbox size and you've reached that limit...please delete some mail" (BTW...50Gb is quite a large mailbox...I work with some large enterprises and they don't have anywhere near that for most of their users). If they don't like it, get them to pay for higher level licenses where they get 100Gb mailboxes or look into archiving and/or retention as I talked about previously.
