A Dog is Man's Best Friend

Every network administrator has at some point or the other, to deal with the problem of limited mailbox resources on Microsoft Exchange server. This means that mailbox management becomes absolutely crucial to ensure that all business functions, especially emails run smoothly. This would involve setting limits on mailbox sizes, monitoring how much mail is being stored on the server as well as encouraging users to archive their mails through Offline folder files or OST files as much as possible. It is important to get end-users to appreciate that the volume of the email they store affects everyone, they have to archive their Outlook data and be aware of ways to recover exchange data.

If a business organization has only 50 employees, mailbox management might not be of such concern to the administrator. On the other hand, in an organization of 500 or more employees, there is bound to be an overload of the mailboxes stored on the Exchange server and the administrator has to seriously consider setting limits on mailboxes. What makes it worse is the fact that Exchange 2003 Standard Service Pack 1.0, has a default limit by which it restricts the total size of all the mailboxes together to 16 GB. In other words, if the volume of the emails stored in the mailboxes on the Exchange server crosses 16 GB, Exchange will immediately dismount the mailbox and stop sending or receiving mail. Administrators therefore have to take all steps necessary to ensure that users keep their email volume under check, and understand how best to protect and recover exchange data.

Some administrators look at installing Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2.0 (SP2), that has a larger size limit of 75 GB on the information that it can store. One could also look at upgrading to an Exchange Server Enterprise Edition - this does not have any size limit but at close to $4000, it is extremely pricey! The best option for an administrator is therefore to encourage users to archive their Exchange data on their local computers. The way the Archive feature works is as follows.

Though the mailbox is stored on the Exchange server, the Outlook inbox contains a local cached copy. This allows the user to continue working on the mails even if there is an interruption in the network. By setting the Archive feature in Outlook, mail will be cached from the server into an offline folder file called OST file, specifically the Archive.ost file. This OST file will be stored on the user's local computer. This gives the user the benefit of having a local copy of the items form the mailbox and also ends up cleaning the mailbox on the server.

On the other hand, the Archive feature also raises some concerns. If the local OST file were to get damaged or corrupted, then the user might end up losing all the data stored in the Archive.ost file. This is where specialized tools such as Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen come in handy - these tools can easily scan and repair OST files, restoring all the contents into PST Files. This makes it easy to backup and recover exchange data when the need arises.