Archives are challenges - for both users and administrators. Users think their *stuff* has disappeared. Administrators have to track multiple "real" mailboxes (and quotas) that theoretically are a single logical mailbox, instead of one mailbox - never mind the searching hassles.
Outlook is also optimized now for a single quick local search and then fires off a search request to the server - and it can be configured to not even try the local cache first (as you want to do in a VDI environment). Searching the archive(s) is just more hassle. I'm not quoting a Microsoft opinion by saying that personal archive are a mistake - it's my personal opinion. But I think it's clear based on the evolution of records management in Exchange and the other Office Servers that MSFT has also come to that conclusion. From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Maglinger, Paul Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2017 4:25 PM To: 'exchange@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [Exchange] RE: Exchange User Mailbox Size Limits Thanks for the clarification Michael. I've find your comment about the personal archives interesting. Can you elaborate (beside what I see as moving *stuff* from one mailbox database to another and ultimately having lots of *stuff* in 2 places now instead of one)? That, and personal archives seem to be a particular challenge to eDiscovery and 3rd party applications such as Exchange Manager that seem to have trouble getting into them to poke around. Paul From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com<mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com> [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Michael B. Smith Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2017 2:55 PM To: exchange@lists.myitforum.com<mailto:exchange@lists.myitforum.com> Subject: [Exchange] RE: Exchange User Mailbox Size Limits Google doesn't back it up. Neither does Office 365. They just have "another copy" in a remote datacenter. Office 365 keeps two current copies in your local datacenter, another current copy in a remote datacenter, and a seven day lagged copy in a remote datacenter. I don't know the google specifics, but I'm certain it is similar. However, in both cases, remember that they are NOT using "enterprise class disk subsystems". They are using JBOD. So disk is cheap and failures are expected. Personal archives were a mistake. You can see that MSFT is heading in that direction by increasing primary mailbox sizes from 25 GB to 50 GB and now 100 GB... I have a lot of clients that just gave up on quotas in the 2013 timeframe. Even more in the 2016 timeframe. Others keep quotas just in case of mail loops. Some still keep quotas but, as Paul points out, they are increasingly difficult to justify. From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com<mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com> [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Maglinger, Paul Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2017 1:51 PM To: 'exchange@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [Exchange] RE: Exchange User Mailbox Size Limits Ooooooo... a can of worms! Our default for most users is PSAR at 160MB Our "special" people get PSARs somewhere between 200MB and 500MB - the higher levels mostly to Marketing and Real Estate folks who can't get their vendors to use sftp for ridiculously large graphic and CAD files. That being said, we have a 20MB limit on incoming mail. We have one exec who is capped at 1.5GB and another at 2GB (20,000 and 28,000 items respectively). The justification for increasing the mailbox limit is usually "if my mailbox fills up I'll miss important email". So you increase it again, it fills up, increase, it fills, rinse, repeat, rinse... We currently have a group of users using Exchange Personal Archives with Retention Policies and Tags. These currently have no limits on them which is doing a great job of proving that the more space you give a user the more "stuff" they will put in there. Case in point with the mailbox limits. It also proves that users will put the longest retention tag on everything they keep. The other users are still using PSTs for now, which would be migrated into Personal Archives if we continue to move that direction. And we're talking terabytes in that alone. The main issue here isn't the storage. I could easily throw terabytes at the servers to accommodate. The issue is backup and recovery. I know, I know, we've been told that if we're running a DAG that tape backups are necessarily needed but tape backup is part of our DR strategy. The problem is if you're going to back up your mailbox databases it has to go somewhere, whether on tape or disk-to-disk. We could backup to the cloud but there is an expense to that as well. And it's hard to impose quotas on mailboxes without the users pointing to Google mail and saying "They give me 15GB!!! Why can't we have 15GB???" The fact is that Google has the resources to backup and restore that kind of data. Good luck! Paul From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com<mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com> [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Carol Fee Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2017 12:08 PM To: exchange@lists.myitforum.com<mailto:exchange@lists.myitforum.com> Subject: [Exchange] Exchange User Mailbox Size Limits I'm curious to know what/if any user mailbox size limits people are setting these days. So .... My questions are Are you using Exchange on premise/Azure/Office 365 ? (We are Exchange on prem) Do you use an archiving solution for your Exchange mailboxes ? (We are using Barracuda Message Archiver) If so, what is archived ? (We automatically archive nightly anything >50kb) What have you set for size limits on your Exchange mailboxes ? Thanks in advance. ________________________________ Carol Fee Network Administrator 617-338-0623 c...@massbar.org<mailto:c...@massbar.org> [cid:image003.jpg@01D2B92F.8EC9D880] Massachusetts Bar Association 20 West Street Boston, MA 02111-1204 (617) 338-0500
