Enable a Personal Archive for an Existing Mailbox

  • Article

By enabling the personal archive for a mailbox, you can regain control of the organization's messaging data by eliminating the need for .pst files. The personal archive also allows users to store messages in an archive mailbox, which is then accessible to users from Microsoft Outlook 2010 and Microsoft Office Outlook Web App.

When you enable a personal archive for a mailbox, the archive and the mailbox will reside on the same server. For more information about moving archive mailboxes, see Understanding Move Requests.

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

Prerequisites

  • We recommend that mailbox users move all current archive data stored in their .pst files into their Inbox so they don't lose any messages. Alternatively, administrators can move the mailbox data by using the Import-Mailbox cmdlet. For more information, see Understanding Importing and Exporting Mailbox Data.
  • Online archives are a premium feature and require an Exchange Enterprise client access license to enable an archive for a mailbox.

Use the EMC to enable a personal archive for an existing mailbox

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Recipient Provisioning Permissions" section in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

Properties specific to a user mailbox are controlled by the Set-Mailbox cmdlet. In the EMC, you can set additional properties, and the permissions may vary depending upon the feature that you're configuring. With the permissions listed for this procedure, you can edit all of the settings available in the <User Mailbox> Properties dialog box.

  1. In the console tree, navigate to Recipient Configuration > Mailbox.
  2. In the result pane, select the user you want to enable an archive for.
  3. In the action pane, click Enable Archive.
  4. A warning appears confirming that you want to enable the personal archive. Click Yes.

Use the Shell to enable a personal archive for an existing mailbox

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Recipient Provisioning Permissions" section in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

This example enables the personal archive for Tony Smith's mailbox.

Set-Mailbox "Tony Smith" -Archive

This example enables the personal archive for all mailboxes on mailbox database DB01.

Get-Mailbox -Database DB01 | Set-Mailbox -Archive

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see Set-Mailbox and Get-Mailbox.

Other Tasks

After you enable the personal archive, you may want to configure the archive storage quotas. By default, personal archives are created with unlimited quotas. For details, see Configure Personal Archive Quotas for a Mailbox.