I don't know what the marketshare would be, but a common solution is to use server-based archiving from IBM. Archiving solutions differ in their purpose. Some are primarily for ediscovery, and so are not designed with the end user in mind. Another consideration is that archiving everything forever can become prohibitively expensive. It makes sense to decide upfront whether this will be extended to everyone or just critical staff, and what the cut-off point for retention of archives will be.

I have set a server based policy to archive mailboxes.

It runs every week on all mailbox (with a compact -A command started through a program document).

Policy is set to prevent user to change anything nor to use its own parameters.

Archive database is easily accessed from the mailbox itself.

Main advantages:

1- user does not need to do anything

2- archive is fully controlled by admin (acl monitoring, accessibility, backup, ...)

One bad thing is there are little differences between the look and the behaviour of the user's mailbox and the archive. So it may be possible to send (and store) an email from the archive.

Another thing : it might be not so convenient for mobile users...

Currently we archive a couple of non-user mail files using a program document using Compact and -a

If he's looking for a solution for execs only, this may be an option.

However, the archive policy document appears to apply to all users, and we just don't have the space to maintain user archives on the server.

Don't you find that's an issue?

Does anyone do any kind of cloud archiving?  We aren't running IBM Verse yet, and if we do, it will be on premise.

Hi,

Couple of questions: what is your current backup solution?  Does it have an agent to backup local PCs to some sort of cheaper network storage i.e. a NAS box of some sort?  I know that our one backup solution (older Sonicwall) had an agent for PCs.  If the archiving is only happening once a day, perhaps it could archive to this slower, cheaper storage.

In our case, because the company I do work for really wants everything available offsite for DR purposes, we have two Sonicwall appliances and the data is first backed up onto the onsite one and then replicated offsite to a data center.  This was relatively expensive when we got it 5 years ago and I know that this can now be done other ways (i.e. purchase software and then build  your own servers out of inexpensive servers with a lot of cheap disks).

If you are using DAOS, not sure where they get stored if the archives are on a different volume.

Albert

I've never been into Archiving myself, but we have had a few users over the years archive to their Network folder. The up side is that it doesn't take up mail server storage and it's backed up.

We've always had a policy that users should not store any data on their local PCs - but to their network share - exactly because of the difficulty in backing up local PC data. In a few cases, remote salesmen and the like, we either use ViceVersa to back their local data (my documents) up to the server when they're connected, or to a USB harddrive that is in their possession.  We've also used Carbonite to back up local data to the cloud - which also gives us the ability for an admin to get to the data for legal reasons if needed...

You don't have it to be applied to all of your users.

You may consider to apply an  archive policy to some users or (beter) to a group of users.

It may be also a good idea to archive on another server.

For example, my mailboxes are stored on srv1 and the archive db are stored on srv9, which is a less porwerfull than srv1 but has a larger storage capacity.