HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 4,212
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
I've recently migrated a customer from local Exchange to Exchange Online. All 35 employees are using Outlook.
When they had local Exchange, we used archiving to keep old emails still accessible, but out of the main mailbox. The archives are in PSTs and stored on the server, backed up each night with the regular backup.
Some employees have years of archives, totaling 20 to 30 GB of data.
The owner of the company is particularly egregious in this, essentially using his Deleted Items folder as storage for old messages. His archives consist almost entirely of Deleted Items and Sent Items. I have tried over the years to push him into a more-accepted way to handle his email, to no avail. This is his system and he wants to keep using it.
So, now that we are using online Exchange, with a 50GB limit per mailbox, I'm wondering how best to handle the existing and future archives.
- I could continue to handle archiving locally, setting Outlook to auto-archive to the PSTs in my existing network folder. I would turn off the online archiving.
- I could import all of the existing archives into the employees' online files, and let Exchange handle archiving online. My total local archives at this point are about 150GB.
- I could use online archiving for most folks, but keep local archiving for the 5 or 6 folks that have the big archives.
I'm also concerned with the Deleted Items retention policy for the owner that will not be expecting his Deleted Items folder to be messed with in any way. For now, I've set his online account retention policy to "No Policy", but I'm wondering if this is the equivalent of "off" or not.
This is a non-HIPAA environment and there are no industry requirements regarding email retention.
How would you handle this?
When they had local Exchange, we used archiving to keep old emails still accessible, but out of the main mailbox. The archives are in PSTs and stored on the server, backed up each night with the regular backup.
Some employees have years of archives, totaling 20 to 30 GB of data.
The owner of the company is particularly egregious in this, essentially using his Deleted Items folder as storage for old messages. His archives consist almost entirely of Deleted Items and Sent Items. I have tried over the years to push him into a more-accepted way to handle his email, to no avail. This is his system and he wants to keep using it.
So, now that we are using online Exchange, with a 50GB limit per mailbox, I'm wondering how best to handle the existing and future archives.
- I could continue to handle archiving locally, setting Outlook to auto-archive to the PSTs in my existing network folder. I would turn off the online archiving.
- I could import all of the existing archives into the employees' online files, and let Exchange handle archiving online. My total local archives at this point are about 150GB.
- I could use online archiving for most folks, but keep local archiving for the 5 or 6 folks that have the big archives.
I'm also concerned with the Deleted Items retention policy for the owner that will not be expecting his Deleted Items folder to be messed with in any way. For now, I've set his online account retention policy to "No Policy", but I'm wondering if this is the equivalent of "off" or not.
This is a non-HIPAA environment and there are no industry requirements regarding email retention.
How would you handle this?
