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Connect a Disconnected Personal Archive

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Personal archives become disconnected when they're disabled. When disabled, the personal archive is retained in the mailbox database for a specified amount of time. During that time, the personal archive is in a disconnected state. By default, Exchange retains disconnected personal archives for 30 days. During this time, you can recover the personal archive by associating it with an existing mailbox. For more information, see Configure Deleted Mailbox and Disabled Personal Archive Retention.

Note

If you disable a personal archive for a user mailbox and then enable a personal archive for that same mailbox, the mailbox will get a new personal archive.

Looking for other management tasks related to personal archives? Check out Managing Personal Archive.

Use the EMC to connect a disconnected personal archive

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Personal archives" entry in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

  1. In the console tree, navigate to Recipient Configuration > Disconnected Mailbox.

    Note

    If the personal archive that you want to connect to a mailbox isn't displayed in the result pane, restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service, and then run the Clean-MailboxDatabase cmdlet against the mailbox database that contains the personal archive.

  2. In the result pane, select the personal archive that you want to connect to a primary mailbox.

  3. In the action pane, click Connect to Primary Mailbox.

  4. A warning appears confirming that you want to connect the personal archive to a specific user. This is the user to whom the archive belongs. Click Yes.

Use the Shell to connect a disconnected personal archive

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Personal archives" entry in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

  1. If you don't know the name of the personal archive, you can view it in the Shell by running the following command. This example finds all disconnected personal archives on mailbox database DB01 and displays additional information about the personal archives such as the GUID and item count.

    Get-MailboxDatabase "DB01" | Get-MailboxStatistics | Where {($_.DisconnectDate -ne $null) -and ($_.IsArchiveMailbox -eq $true)} Format-List

  2. Connect the personal archive to the primary mailbox. This example connects Chris Ashton's archive to Chris Ashton's primary mailbox and uses the GUID as the personal archive's identity.

    Connect-Mailbox -Identity "8734c04e-981e-4ccf-a547-1c1ac7ebf3e2" -Archive -User "Chris Ashton" -Database "DB01"

  3. A warning appears stating that you'll have to wait for Active Directory replication to complete before the user can access the personal archive.

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see the following topics: