I see nothing wrong in having multiple PST archive files but then I
create them so they contain one year's worth of e-mails and haven't
found they get near the 2GB boundary, but I suppose if you have users
that gets loads of crap or fluff e-mails that they continue to save
instead of deleting them then it could be a problem.
At the end of each year, an auto-archive is ran or the archive file so
far created gets saved on a file server in a user store. The desktops
are often not backed up so having the PST files on the file server does
get them backed up there. At the end of 2001, you auto-archive (move)
everything up to the end of 2000. At the end of 2002, you auto-archive
everything up to the end of 2001. At the end of 2003, you auto-archive
everything up to the end of 2002. And so on. You basically end up with
1 year's worth of e-mails per PST archive file (except for the first PST
file). Are you users trying to use just one PST file to archive
everything? If they keep PST files that archive only a year's worth of
e-mails, do they get anywhere near the 2 GB boundary (actually 1.87 GB)?
The real problem then is getting the employees motivated to do the
auto-archive of everything older than up to the end of the prior year
when the end of this year approaches. This is what we did in our
software QA department when we hit mailbox limits and IT was too slow in
executing our requests to up mailbox size. Because we even hit limits
in our quota on the file server, we would save the oldest PST files onto
CDs. There was the rare occasion that we had to look something up from
5 to 7 years ago, usually for a really old version of our product that
the customer was using and who was still paying us for support of it.
Although Microsoft recommends not using PST files when they are on a
networked drive (
http://snurl.com/2lzq), they are only there as a backup
to let the user get at e-mail that is over one year old so the user
doesn't need to always have it open in their instance of Outlook. Of
course, you're really only trading disk space on the file server for
disk space used by Exchange, so the easier solution is to enlarge the
quota for a mailbox on a per-request basis after the user has been first
prompted to clean out the fluff and crap from their mailbox, especially
for graphical or large attachments since presumably they were saved
elsewhere for whatever business purpose they were intended).
Simply present to management that if they do not back any limits on the
size of mailboxes then by implication they ARE backing the purchase of
more or larger drives along perhaps with higher performance hardware on
which to run the Exchange server to handle it all.
"Aside from new management, ..." Why do I picture you at home oiling
and polishing your shotgun? Hmm, new management, yeah, tomorrow we get
new management.
