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...
NTA-Mark Just to clarify, you mention Exchange and you mention Office 365. They are essentially two different things. When we use the term "Exchange" we are normally referring to a physical on premises server installed and managed by the customer. Exchange Online is Microsoft's cloud service that is managed by Microsoft and is sometimes referred to as "Office 365". I'm going to assume that the user's mailboxes are in Exchange Online (Office 365).
Depending on the licence that your users have, a user can have both a mailbox, and an online archive. Both of these may have size restrictions, again depending on the license. If the user has both a regular mailbox and an online archive, they will see both when connecting via Outlook and via OWA:
This really isn't something that an admin can manage as it's an issue with the amount of data the users are storing in the archive as the size of the archive has exceeded the licensed limit. What the users need to do is open the archive and remove unwanted messages. Having the user remove attachments and storing them in OneDrive may also significantly reduce the archive size. Users can also use the Outlook client to export messages to a file for storage elsewhere, but then you have an issue with where you store that file and the fact that the file may be a security issue (anyone who gets that file can open the messages in it) so it's not something I recommend.
HI Dan,
Thank you for the reply,
Also thank you for the information. Since I have not had to deal with Office 365 and the on line Exchange file in the accounts it is a totally different jungle to navigate.
You are correct. These users have office 365 business standard on their machine and local outlook account and their cloud version on-line. This is what has reached the 50G limit in there standard license. I have been able to use the outlook tools to reduce the size on the local machine, but no way to reduce the on-line server archive file. Thus I was looking to back this file up and then delete it and let it start over.
So you are saying that this can not be done?
How do you edit the on-line archive file to reduce its size?
I need a way to manage this on-line file.
I tried to enter the server using the the shell commands but ran into one error after another in accessing it. I was tole by Microsoft support I could do this from my exchange admin center but documentation link diagrams are not the same as in my admin center. To me it looks like the older version of admin center where mine was upgraded a little while back. But none of my menus offered the backup option they described.
This is a commercial insurance agency insuring mostly truckers. Lots of documents with PDF attachments. Took 7 years before this on-line archive file to reach its limit but is now causing issues.
Dan it sounds like you know and understand the outlook online archive account. Can you recommend a plan of action I can use to resolve this issue?
Thank you again for your help.
Mark
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
