In-place Archive Office 365 Storage – What Are the Updates?

The in-place archive Office 365 storage feature offers additional storage space to Office 365 users. This archive feature is to be enabled in order to move emails to the archive mailbox, which adds 100 GB of additional storage space.

In the previous update, users had to contact Microsoft whenever the 100 GB storage quota was exceeded to get more storage space. With the new update, Microsoft has eliminated this feature, and a new auto-expanding archiving feature has been introduced.

Let’s learn about this feature in detail to understand what changes have been made.

Changes Made with In-Place Archive Office 365 Storage

The biggest change with the new update is that when a user connects with Microsoft to get additional storage, they can get up to 1.5 TB of storage space.

Whenever the quota in the Archive mailbox is exceeded, the size of the mailbox is automatically increased until it reaches the limit of 1.5 TB.

Point to Note: Shared mailboxes are also supported by the auto-expanding archiving feature. You should have an Exchange Online Plan 2 or 1 license along with an Exchange Online Archiving license.

Take a look at how the auto-expanding in-place archive Office 365 storage feature works.

Auto-Expanding Feature and Its Working

When the auto-expanding feature is enabled to get additional storage after the mailbox space is exceeded, storage space is automatically inserted in the mailbox.

This feature periodically goes through the size of the archive mailbox, and when the archive gets close to its storage limit, it will create additional space for new emails.

Also Read: See Why Google Vault Export is Stuck at 95 % and How to Fix it

The same process stays on the loop until the limit of 1.5 TB of storage space is reached, and the admin doesn’t have to request the storage space.

What Does In-Place Archive Office 365 Storage Include & How to Enable it?

The auto-expanding archiving feature can be used efficiently by Microsoft 365 by deciding which folders are to be moved to the archive mailbox.

At times when you move a folder, this facility creates one or more subfolders inside the main folder, which are later listed when the archive portion is viewed.

In these subfolders are the items of the original folders distributed during the moving process. The naming pattern of these subfolders is <folder name> _yyyy (created on mmm dd, yyy h_mm).

Here in the in-place archive Office 365 storage, yyy is the year the messages were received, mmm dd, yyy, h_m is the date and time of the creation of the subfolder in UTC format. The format looks something like this:

With the help of this in-place archive Office 365 storage feature, the content can be distributed to an auxiliary archive. But the items moved to the subfolders might not always be the case. There are times when an entire folder is moved to the auxiliary archive.

This folder, stored in the auxiliary in-place archive Office 365 storage, retains its original name and is not apparent in the Outlook folder list.

Step 1. Open PowerShell and install the ExchangeOnlineManagement module if needed:

Install-Module -Name ExchangeOnlineManagement

Step 2. Then, Connect to Exchange Online:

Import-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement
Connect-ExchangeOnline -UserPrincipalName <your admin UPN>
Enter your admin credentials when prompted.

Step 3. To, Enable Auto-Expanding Archiving you have two options:

3.1 For Entire Organization:

Set-OrganizationConfig -AutoExpandingArchive

3.2 Or, For Specific User:

Enable-Mailbox -Identity <user> -AutoExpandingArchive
Replace <user> with the user's email address or UPN.

Note: For hybrid with on-premises primary and cloud archive, use the organization command. For all cloud mailboxes, use the user-specific command.

Step 4. Finally, Verify the Setting:

4.1 Organization:

Get-OrganizationConfig | Format-List AutoExpandingArchiveEnabled
Confirm AutoExpandingArchiveEnabled : True.

4.2 Specific User:

Get-Mailbox -Identity <user> | Format-List AutoExpandingArchiveEnabled
Confirm AutoExpandingArchiveEnabled : True.

4.3 Inactive Mailboxes:

Get-Mailbox -InactiveMailboxOnly | Format-List UserPrincipalName,AutoExpandingArchiveEnabled

Requirements for Outlook to Access Items in the Auto-Expanding Feature

The data that is stored in the auto-expanded archive mailbox, Outlook users should have one of the following clients:

• Outlook 2019 or 2016 versions for Windows or Mac
• Outlook on the web

Important Point: If you have mailboxes used for an individual user (or shared mailboxes), only then you can use the auto-expanding archiving feature. Also, the mailbox should have a growth rate below 1 GB per day and the in-place archive Office 365 storage will only be intended for just one user. Users are not permitted to copy emails to the archive mailbox by using journaling, transport rules, or auto-forwarding rules. Moreover, Microsoft has all the rights to deny any additional archiving requests to store other user’s data in your archive mailbox or in cases of inappropriate use.

More Important Points of the Auto-Expand Archiving

• The archiving feature enables a user or shared mailbox to create 100 GB of space, and the warning quota is set to 90 GB.
• The in-place archive Office 365 storage auto-expanding feature allows archiving the mailbox along with the Recoverable Items folder. When this archiving mailbox reaches 90 GB, the auto-expanding archive is activated and adds 100 GB of storage space. It takes up to 30 days to provision the additional storage.
• If the mailbox is put on hold or a retention policy is assigned, the storage limit is exceeded by 110 GB.

Note: If you want to export data from the archive mailbox, you can go for the Office 365 Export Tool. It will help you to download the data from your archive mailbox to the desired location.

Wrapping Up

The in-place archive Office 365 storage feature can be used to move the data from the mailbox to the in-place archive mailbox. The updated feature of the archive mailbox automatically adds storage in the archive mailbox when the limit is reached.

Also Read: Steps to  Migrate Emails from Sapo Mail to Gmail

With the auto-expanding archiving feature, the quota limit is set to 90 GB activates the archive feature whenever this limit is close to adding space without having to contact Microsoft.