Re: Mailbox size on Exchange 2003

Responses inline.

--
Bharat Suneja
MVP - Exchange
www.zenprise.com
NEW blog location:
www.exchangepedia.com/blog
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<julien.palombo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1158755367.913011.325540@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi all,


I'm an Exchange Admin. in a small company...I use Exchange 2003 with
Outlook 2003 on the clients part.

Some users have pretty big mailboxes on the server...like 7 GB !

As you can see we use a lot the emails to communicate and my Managers
want me to keep all emails... So every 6 months I archive their emails
into a PST in order to reduce the size of their mailbox on the
Exchanger server.

Some PST archives are now reaching 6.5 GB ! and they're still working
fine but for how long...

Here are my questions :
- what is the size limit for a PST ?

Legacy PSTs (before Outlook 2003) were limited to 2 Gb. Outlook allows you
to create Unicode PSTs, not compatible with older versions of Outlook. These
can span your hard drive, do not have a size limit as such.


- what is the size limit for a mailbox hosted on an Exchange 2003
Enterprise Edition ?

No hard-coded size limit as such - folks have multi-Gig mailboxes.
Nevertheless, this does have performance implications, particularly if you
have more than 3500-5000 items in critical/most-acessed folders like Inbox,
Calendar, et al. On the server side your Store sizes will continue to grow
really large causing issues with 1) backups, and therefore really long
restore times should you need to recover a Store 2) nightly Store
maintenance 3) any anti-virus scanning you may do on the Store 4)
performance.



I've seen on the internet that we should keep pst under 2GB, then how
should I archive their emails, by creating 3 or more PST ?

Unicode PSTs grow larger than 2 Gb so if you're using Outlook 2003 you're
OK. People do use multiple PSTs. It's also important to impress upon people
that they don't really need all their email from 1995! (Better organization,
regular clean-up/maintenance).


How big firm with emails addicted employees handle that?

Depends upon the business/IT requirements. If retention is important for
historical email, organizations invest in appropriate retention products and
storage. Mailbox storage quotas are implemented - I would recommend doing
that as well. This prevents mailboxes from getting that large in the first
place. Important users/execs demand larger mailboxes and they need to be
accomodated, but most users can be restricted. You need to talk to your
manager/management about implications of such large mailboxes, figure out
the business requirements and come up with appropriate policies regarding
mailbox sizes, archiving (including if there's a requirement/budget for an
archiving solution and extra storage if required), and set up mailbox
quotas.


Please Help, emails are getting out of control !
Thanks



.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Scripting/Programming Outlook .PST Backups (advice sought)
    ... S web site which will allow you to make PST copies of user mailboxes. ... This utility can copy an exchange mailbox to a PST file or copy multiple ... mailboxes to multiple PST files. ...
    (microsoft.public.outlook)
  • Re: Scripting/Programming Outlook .PST Backups (advice sought)
    ... S web site which will allow you to make PST copies of user mailboxes. ... This utility can copy an exchange mailbox to a PST file or copy multiple ... mailboxes to multiple PST files. ...
    (microsoft.public.outlook.program_vba)
  • Re: Scripting/Programming Outlook .PST Backups (advice sought)
    ... S web site which will allow you to make PST copies of user mailboxes. ... This utility can copy an exchange mailbox to a PST file or copy multiple ... mailboxes to multiple PST files. ...
    (microsoft.public.outlook.program_addins)
  • Re: Exchange POP3 Service Questions
    ... But the problem is that the emails are only on ... > using Exchange mailboxes. ... > the POP3 accounts, but how can I do it with Exchange mailboxes? ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.setup)
  • Re: Mobile users setup files
    ... As for the old emails ... I would suggest importing those into their Exchange ... Mailbox, no way to get those mails offline if they are in a PST file. ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)
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