Exchange 2003 Guru's, let me pick your brain

[seepy83]

Quick background to get your wheels turning, and then you can let me know if you need more info...

Like many organizations, we are required to keep an archive of all email communications. I've been trying to get a solution like Symantec Enterprise Vault or GFI MailArchiver implemented for the past 2 years, but it has largly fallen on deaf ears. Our solution for archiving all email right now is a Journal Mailbox that holds a copy of every email.

The management here will not let us restrict user mailbox size.

Our Mailbox Store (priv1.edb) is 70.3 GB today, and is growing by about 140 MB per Day. We're on Exchange 2003, so the size limit is 75GB. The projection for when we will hit that limit is +/- 30 days.


Our Journal Mailbox is approx. 30GB...so if I could start fresh with a new Journal, I could buy myself a considerable amount of time to be able to have the approval/budget for a good email archival solution/software.

Is it practical to backup to Journal Mailbox to tape, delete the Journal Mailbox, and start will a new one?
If I can do this, what are the implications if I ever need to restore that mailbox to retrieve emails?

 

[Bashbelly]

I have implemented this at our site. http://www.commvault.com/products-archive.html

works great, journals backed up then content indexed. Mailbox restores a cinch from same interface.
Also you have attempted to do an offline defrag using esutil? works wonders in clearing up space, if possible to schedule offhours that is.

http://www.petri.co.il/defragm...3_server_databases.htm

 

[seepy83]

Bashbelly -
Thanks for the product recommendations, but I think we've already decided on Symantec Enterprise Vault as our product of choice for archiving.

Hopefully I'll be able to do an offline defrag this weekend to regain some space.

For now, can anyone comment on whetheror not it's practical to make a backup of our current Journal Mailbox, Delete the current one, and start with a new (empty) Journal?

 

[Genx87]

Another option is to create new stores based on business units. I have implemented an archiving solution with Smarsh. But their expertise is more on the banking side. Live Office is another solution I would consider. The cost is about 10 bucks per mailbox per month. But it takes the archiving off your hands.

http://www.liveoffice.com/
www.smarsh.com

 

[seepy83]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Another option is to create new stores based on business units.

Unfortunately this is the Standard Edition of Exchange. I believe you need Enterprise to have more than one Mailbox Store.

 

[Genx87]

Yes silly me. 75GB limit = standard = 1 store.
Well i do suggest looking at the 3rd party archivers. I really had a hard time making the numbers come out on a built in house system when you included the cost of hardware, software, and maintenance unless the organization was over a few hundred people.

 

[imagoon]

It sounds like your in one of those fun situations where you might send emails stating mostly what you are saying here to management and when they continue to say "no" let the system crash / store dismount and see how quickly they respond when you have copies of those message (in PDF form of course since the mail server is down) on hand.

Anyway you should be able to archive the journal mailbox the same way as you do any user. Then take the resulting archive and stick it some place safe (like on the mail server if you have the capacity.) Not to bash MS but this is one of the reasons I prefer Lotus Domino over Exchange. Domino costs a little more to start up with but once you have it there is far fewer artificial limitations. I have 250gig worth of "mail stores" on one machine and it doesn't even blink an eye.

 

[drebo]

We've had wonderful success with other Barracuda devices, such as their spam firewall, and this product comes highly recommended: http://www.barracudanetworks.c.../archiver-overview.php . It's their Mail Archiver. I believe it's significantly cheaper than the Symantec device.