Experienced trivia-2 or "What should I do with all this mail"?

The continuation of the cycle of posts about "experienced trivialities", about the nuances, examples, scripts, solutions of various interesting or routine tasks that I had to face during the years of work of the windows admin.
The pilot issue dealt with the task “to determine which user is working on which computer”, today we will discuss the problem of mail database growth and one of the ways to solve it on the MS Exchange server.

Formulation of the problem

The essence of the problem was trivial - a VERY BIG VOLUME of postal bases. At that time, it was about 800 GB lying on the same server (in fairness, I must say that the server handled the load at the very least, although the Exchange 2003 32-bit was a bit of a nuisance to it).

The specifics of the company imposed the following restrictions:

• the vast majority of users need access to their old letters, preferably in the form sorted by them (contractors, cities, the size of warts on the nose and other subjective criteria)
• The management was eager to be able to restore the mail of their employees if it was accidentally / accidentally deleted, even if hard, and “without the possibility of recovery”, if the computer broke down, and so on.
• admins want to backup mail does not toss and turn like a pregnant elephant for 30-40 hours, but could be performed at least overnight
• data safety, protection against deletion, was most important, the management was afraid of losing “something important” .
• MS Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 worked in the company. MS Exchange 2007 was already purchased, but for various reasons, MS Exchange 2007 was not implemented, as a result of which the talk about the upgrade to 2010 was met with uncomfortable misunderstanding and complete unwillingness to spend quite a lot of money.

Monsieur knows a lot about perversions, or solutions

Strategically, the solution to the problem was generally understandable - you need to enter quotas on mailboxes (it can be differentiated depending on the department, user needs, etc.) and transfer old letters to archives. The whole question was how it is better (for admins) and more convenient (for users) to do. There were several options, and I began to work them out “on cats”.

• The easiest thing was to ban everyone to delete the old mail, arguing that the email client was not for storing data, but for prompt correspondence. And if necessary - get the necessary letters from backups. It immediately became clear that the method is hopeless, saying that it was met with aggressive misunderstanding on the part of all users, including the management, so the process of pulling out of the backup was incredibly dreary and long, and the situation when a person is VERY URGENT need his archive for 2006, was not so rare.
• Rejecting the first impulse, I tritely merged all the old letters into local PSTs and set up auto-archiving using Outlook. There were more minuses than pluses: the mail was lying on the workstations, was unprotected from the burned-out HDD and the archives could not be viewed by going through the WEB interface (giving remote computers all remote access to their computers was not allowed by the SAT department, and in my opinion correctly did ).
• Then I fiddled with the script “once a week to go around the computers through the list and merge the PST into a folder on the server” - it was fun, it was crammed enough, especially with tricky Outlook, which, when opened, SO blocks the PST file, which cannot be copied in any way while Outlook will not close.
• The next logical step was to transfer the PST archives to a centralized repository, to the network. There were problems with the fact that if at the moment of opening \ work \ closing of Outlook the network was broken, the user got a 50% chance at the next opening to get a window “a check of an incorrectly closed PST goes,” which could hang from 5 minutes to an hour, depending on PST sizes. And even if you close your eyes to all this, there was still no way to let people work with archives remotely.

What happened in the end.

Finally, I remembered the law of the inventor of the bicycle, and decided to manually repeat what was already done, but in conjunction with Exchange 2010 - Outlook 2010 (for those who do not know I recommend reading the documentation, such functionality as archive boxes appeared in this version of Exchange, and, according to reviews of friends, works quite well). The result is this:
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1. First of all, I migrated to Exchange 2007 , since there is such an opportunity - to miss a sin. Separately tinkering configured OWA through ISA. It became a little easier because 2007 64-bit and understands a lot of RAM, which is something, and I have never regretted this good for servers.
2. for each user who did not fit into the predefined quota, a phantom user "Username archive " with the alias arc.username was created , and he accordingly also had a mailbox. For a change, I made them all the Equipment type, so that you can later be guaranteed to be distinguished from ordinary workers. Respectively, the rights were distributed so that an ordinary user has full access to the box of his “phantom”
3. Hid all phantoms from the Global Address List , “for order”, and grouped them into separate Database in the Storage group, where Circullar logging is enabled and which lie on a large-large RAID partition.
4. In the same Storage Group were also so-called. SAT boxes where logging of especially important users merged.
5. For each user, the support connected his phantom colleague to Outlook, and pumped all mail into the phantom box, which fell under the archive criterion.
6. Anyone who has an archive can now remotely, through OWA, quietly rummage in it, a small instruction has been written on this subject for particularly dull.
7. The size of the “operational” Exchange databases, those that turn every day, and backed up 3 times a week, decreased to an acceptable 200 GB
8. Archive databases are backed up less frequently, along with boxes of Security Councils, once a week, on weekends. By the time we have time to remarkably (and after updating the version of the backup server in general, they began to make a full backup of all the mail in 25 hours).

The downside is that the user has to transfer letters to the archive (unlike, for example, the Exchange 2010 bundle - Outlook 2010, where it can be configured automatically), focusing on Exchange notifications when the quota threshold is reached. But on the other hand, it became even a plus, because during manual transfer, users just sort their mail as they see fit, according to their own criteria.

To be continued.