IT Professionals

Exchange Archiving – Did I Miss Something Here?

Posted by on Aug 27, 2007 | 3 Comments

Speaking as an Exchange user myself, I can certainly understand the frustration. But I cannot help but wonder if the wrong question is being asked here?

What about archiving? From the standpoint of the Exchange provider, this should be really obvious. But what if it’s not? Judging from the person Chris was dealing with, he was wise not to go with a company that did not even have the common sense to present archiving as a possible solution to over-sized email folders.

Take MailStreet for example. They do in fact, provide email backups, which means you are not really sacrificing your old mail. But then what? How is one to proceed next to use it for future viewing and access? For the small business, it sure feels like MS Exchange has fallen on its face here. And bear in mind I say this as a fan.

Myself, I use Evolution in Ubuntu, which stores its local mail in .Mbox format. As Evolution has good Exchange support, I save my old MS Exchange mail by…are you ready for it? Dragging it off of the server into my local mailbox in the client itself. Yeah, a little Shift + left clicking and I just saved a ton of critical emails that I then, back up myself – locally, with dates for easier management.

Now the question I’d like to know? Can Outlook do this, too? Seriously, I am interested as I would like to help Chris have some options here.

On the local level, bulky Mbox and PST files are no fun as they both can be a problem as they get too big. So what are your options? Well, luckily Windows users (and those of us with VMs in Linux), can fall back on this to read our old Mbox archives. MboxView is one option with Mbox2xml being another viable solution should you wish to condense the data down to a single archive.

Then I found it. The best Windows solution I have seen thus far while staying away from expensive enterprise options. MailNavigator – it’s exactly what I was looking for, be it me running once a month or so in a VM (virtual Machine).

Is any of this really all that elegant? Not really. But when you step up to the bar, trade in your local USB syncing, POP3 mail using PIM solution and go with MS Exchange, it seems that we need to be more creative.

[tags]email back up,ms exchange,Outlook[/tags]

  • AG

    I’m far from an Exchange expert but during the time that I was working help desk for the Arkansas National guard we made it a practice to tell users that 2 gigs was the maximum size for Exchange folders.
    Any larger than that and the client risked getting some mail lost through corruption of the mailbox file.
    You can save them on the local machine and then back them up with conventional means, burning to DVD comes to mind but there is no security except physical on that type of backup.

    AG

  • Dave Nickason

    If you’re ok with storing archived messages on the local PC, you can just use the Archive feature in Outlook for this. It’s simple, allows for different settings on different folders, and can be done automatically or manually. See File -> Archive, and Tools -> Options -> Other -> AutoArchive. Public folders are another option, with the benefit of storing the data on the server (presumably better backup there), but you’d want to watch the security settings to prevent unwanted access from others.

    With Outlook and Exchange 2003 or later, if you create Unicode PST files, you shouldn’t have issues with very large PSTs. The coded limit is 20 GB, which can be increased with a reg edit.

  • Jules

    The only way I can archive from Outlook, is to create folders in the file system (outside of Outlook) and drag the files. You can also add the folders to your Outlook Shortcut bar (along the left). BUT, the date you see in the folder is when you dragged it. When you open a message it retains the Outlook “look” and will act like a message. That’s the clumsy way I’m doing it.