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Disable a Personal Archive for a Mailbox

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You may want to disable a user's personal archive for troubleshooting purposes or if you're moving the mailbox to a version of Exchange that doesn't support personal archives.

If you disable the personal archive, all information in the archive will be kept in the mailbox database until the default time passes and the personal archive is permanently deleted. (By default, Exchange keeps all messages for 30 days.) If you want to reconnect the personal archive to that mailbox, you can use the Connect-Mailbox cmdlet with the Archive parameter. For more information, see Connect a Disconnected Personal Archive.

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

Use the EMC to disable a 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 > Mailbox.

  2. In the result pane, select the mailbox for which you want to disable the personal archive.

    Note

    You can create a filter to find all of the personal archives in your organization. In the result pane, click Add Filter. In the filter's list boxes, specify the following values: Has Archive > Equals > Yes. Click Apply Filter.

  3. In the action pane, click Disable Archive.

  4. A warning box appears confirming that you want to disable the archive. Click Yes.

Use the Shell to disable a 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.

Disabling the personal archive will remove the archive from the mailbox and mark it in the mailbox database for deletion. This example disables the archive for Chris Ashton's mailbox. It doesn't disable the mailbox.

Disable-Mailbox -Identity "Chris Ashton" -Archive

A warning appears confirming that you want to disable the archive. Type Y to continue.

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see Disable-Mailbox.

Other Tasks

After you disable the personal archive, you may want to reconnect the disconnected archive. For details, see Connect a Disconnected Personal Archive.