Manage In-Place Archives in Exchange 2016

So let’s see how we can enable and disable the archive mailbox in Exchange 2016.

Once again In-Place archive enable organizations to eliminate usage of PST files, and enable them to be able to do e-discovery search on that data as well to meet the compliance requirement.

It also help users, as they have access to their entire mailbox data, which is accessible from outlook and outlook web access.

Enabling an Archive Mailbox

We can use exchange admin center or the Exchange PowerShell to enable the archive mailbox.

So let’s first see how we can achieve this using EAC

1.     Go to Recipients > Mailboxes.

2.     Select a mailbox.

3.     In the details pane, under In-Place Archive, click Enable.

We can also bulk enable the users for archive mailbox, just select the multiple user mailboxes, and in the details pane click “More options”. Then, under Archive click Enable.

Enabling an Archive Mailbox using Exchange PowerShell

Below example enables the Archive mailbox for the user “Sunil Chauhan”

Enable-Mailbox "Sunil Chauhan" –Archive

Use the below CMD to disable to same.

Disable-Mailbox “Sunil Chauhan" -Archive

Now let’s see some bulk options using PowerShell.

Below Example retrieves mailboxes from the DB04, that don’t have an on-premises or cloud based archive mailbox enabled, this script also excludes DiscoverSearchMailbox, and in the end archive mailbox will be enabled for all the users meeting the search criteria.

Get-Mailbox -Database DB04 -Filter `

{ArchiveGuid -Eq $null -AND ArchiveDomain -eq $null `

-AND Name -NotLike "DiscoverySearchMailbox*"} | Enable-Mailbox –Archive

How to verify if the archive has been enabled?

We can verify the archive using the EUC or from Exchange PowerShell, from the EUC, check the user mailbox property under In-Place Archive, this will show as Enabled or Disabled depending on the status, we can use Exchange PowerShell to check the same by running the below CMD.

Get-Mailbox “sunil Chauhan” | FL Name,*Archive*

We can also use the Test-ArchiveConnectivity cmdlet to test the connectivity to the archive Mailbox.

For more details on the Test-ArchiveConnectivity, please go here

Re-Enabling an Archive Mailbox.

When we disabled an archive mailbox, it become disconnected mailbox, disconnected mailboxes are retained for 30 days, and if we re-enable the archive Mailbox for the same user within 30 days, the old archive mailbox is Re-connected back to the user mailbox, but after 30 days, mailbox will be purged and all the data inside will be lost forever, and if we then re-enabled the archive mailbox for this user, then a new archive mailbox will be created.

There is no separate command to restore the Archive mailbox, the same command will be used to re-connect which we used for enabling Archive Mailbox.

Enable-Mailbox "Sunil Chauhan" –Archive