In the first three parts of this four post series on Exchange archiving I talked about how to enable Archiving for Exchange 2010 using retention policies.  This last post will talk about disabling archiving for a user and what happens to the archived information.

Disabling archive for a user is pretty straight forward.  In the EMC locate the user under Recipient Configuration, right click on the user name and select Disable Archive.  You will get prompted are you sure?  Click Yes.

Once archiving has been disabled the user will no longer be able to see their archived folder in the outlook folder list.  Also, all the content that was in the archived mailbox just went away with the archive database after it was disabled.  What this means is that the data that was moved into the Archive mailbox has just went away.  No worries though!  If you check in the Disconnected Mailbox folder under Recipient Configuration you will see that the archive mailbox is now listed there.  I should point out if you look and don’t see the mailbox you may need to run the Clean-MailboxDatabase –Identity “DatabaseName”.  This will clean the database and drop the archive mailbox into the Disconnected Mailbox folder.  You can see that in the Disconnected Mailbox folder the archive mailbox will be listed.  There is actually a column in the folder that says Is Archive and the option is true or false.  If true, it’s an old archive mailbox.  If false, well, it isn’t!

So, now that we have located our disconnected archive mailboxes which contain data that the user archived in the past the question becomes, how do we get the data out!  Simple.  If you see the archive mailbox listed you can simply Right Click and select the option Connect to Primary Mailbox.  This will then connect the archive mailbox back to the user folder.  Keep in mind that disconnected mailboxes will reside in the Disconnected Mailbox folder for 30 days by default.  Anything beyond that you may have to recover from tape or another means.  Once the archive mailbox has been reconnected the user will be able to extract or add content from/to the archived mailbox.

I should point out that if you disabled both the archive mailbox and the actual user mailbox the process above will fail.  Since the default mailbox has been deleted the archive mailbox cannot connect to the primary mailbox.  This can cause issues for an organization.  Say for example you need to get some data back that was archived and that user is no longer with the organization.  The users mailbox was deleted and now their archive mailbox can no longer be reconnected to the parent mailbox.  I also noticed that you cannot connect a disabled archive mailbox to another users account.  It appears that the archive mailbox can only be connected to the primary mailbox.  So, if you’re looking to get data from a former employee’s mailbox and/or archived mailbox you can either keep the original account and reactivate it or there is one other thing you can do if you’re stuck.  If you still have both the original users mailbox and the users archived mailbox you can connect the users mailbox to another AD account that does not have a mailbox.  Once this is completed you can then connect the archive mailbox back to the primary account mailbox which is now owned by the AD account you created!  This can come in handy in the event where you deleted the users AD account but still have the mail data.

Now that the archive mailbox is reconnected with the primary account one interesting thing I noticed is that archiving does resume, even when in Exchange I have archiving disabled for the user.  My only thought is because of retention policies that are applied to the mailbox are set to move data based on the RPTs.  So heads up! Just because you disabled archiving, if you reconnect the archive mailbox and the retention policy is still applied to the end user archiving will resume.  I could see this being a problem for some clients, so be wary!

If you would like to remove the retention policy from the user you can do so by performing the following command at the EMS:

Set-mailbox user –RetentionPolicy $null

I would suggest doing this for any user whom you decide to disable archiving for.  This will prevent additional items from accidently being dropped into the archive mailbox automatically after you reconnect the mailbox.

This concludes my series on archiving in Exchange 2010.  I hope it will give you guys out there some good insight on what archiving is, how to enable it, and how to disable it.

Thanks for reading!

Other Posts related in this four part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3