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benchapmanFlag for Australia

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Decommission GFI MailArchiver

Hi
Can anyone help me decommission GFI Mail Archiver completely from Exchange?

Currently on Exchange 2003 Standard and will be migrating to 2010 standard shortly. The storage limits on 2003 are no longer an issue and with 4 stores (in 2010) and under 200GB email in total, I would rather have it all in Exchange 2010. I need to know how to safely remove GFI without losing email, what is involved? Is this a really bad idea (older version of GFI) or should we just stop archiving but keep the archives available? I dont particularly want to have to reinstall GFI on the new 2008 r2 platform if possible, I suppose we can keep the 2003 server with GFI just for this if required (all in VMWare anyway with no resource constraints)

Regards
Ben
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Avatar of Simon Butler (Sembee)
Simon Butler (Sembee)
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Hi Simon

Thanks for your feedback. I have not found much on the GFI site at all, PST's seem to be the only way open to me (v6.4). It requires Outlook on the server (not a big deal for a soon to be shut down server) but it only seems to export per user per database. There are 8 data bases and 60 users, this equates to over 500 export jobs. I am not familiar enough with the product to know if a single export job can create a PST per user. If it could, I would be happy enough with that as an option. If it could export multiple databases into a single PST per user, it would be even better, we then only have to decide on archiving PST's or importing via ExMerge.
While I have implemented the product a number of times, I haven't decommissioned it before. Is the product still under support? Asking GFI would be the best option. Another option would be to just leave it in place, and use it just as an archive.

Otherwise it looks like the solution you have found is the only one available, painful as it is.

Simon.
Trial exports to PST indicate it is going to be slow. 6000 messages (1.3GB) took over 30 mins, and a 22,000 message export crashed after 45 mins. It doesnt append to a users pst file but creates a new one of the same name under a different time stamped folder.

Leaving it in place is not really an option as it would require two machines to be kept (databases on separate machine) and we are trying to clean it up.

I am just going to have to suck it up and plug through it. Senior staff first.....

Thanks, Ben