![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2021\/02\/insentra_priom_mashuk_3-30-2020-b2_img_1.jpg\")
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In Office365 (O365), Online Archive\u2019s (OA) have a maximum size limit of 100GB. To manage the size of OA\u2019s, Microsoft has provided a feature called \u201cAuto-expanding archiving\u201d (AEA) or more commonly referred to as \u201cUnlimited Archiving\u201d (UA).<\/p>\n
Now when you hear UA, you\u2019d expect the archive to, well, not have any limits. Unfortunately, this is not the case here. The OA does have limits imposed on it. The limit is now a soft limit of 100GB with a hard cap at 1TB. So why is it called UA or AEA? The OA will have additional storage allocated to it in the form of auxiliary mailboxes. When the OA reaches a certain threshold, it will trigger a flag to the Managed Folder Assistance (MFA) at Microsoft\u2019s systems to signal that more storage needs to be allocated to this OA. Once the MFA has finished processing its tasks, additional storage will be added onto the OA (this is represented in the Microsoft official image above). This can happen multiple times during its lifespan and each auxiliary mailbox which gets allocated can be different sizes. The terminology of UA and AEA comes from this nature of expansion.<\/p>\n
Now to the technical piece.<\/p>\n
In order to enable this neat feature, you\u2019ll need to be either a Global Administrator or member of the Organisation Management role group in O365. The mailboxes will also need to have one of the following licenses assigned:<\/p>\n
There are a few values that Microsoft really tracks on the archive. The main one being the transition threshold. This is generally set at 90GB. Once at the transition threshold, the MFA will start running tasks to start allocating the new auxiliary archives. Oh, by the way – expansion doesn\u2019t occur in real-time. Microsoft states the MFA process can take up to 7 days to successfully process and allocate the additional storage. However, the key point to note here is\u00a0 it takes the MFA up to 7 days\u2026meaning if MFA hasn\u2019t initiated its tasks- potentially you could be waiting longer. So\u2026can you trigger the expansion immediately?<\/p>\n
No. But you can initiate MFA manually. Once MFA has started – it can take up to 7 days to successfully allocate the additional storage\/auxiliary archives.<\/p>\n
You can use the following set of commands to manually start MFA:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Get-Mailbox -identity <MAILBOX> | select -ExpandProperty MailboxLocations<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
#Start MFA on the MainArchive location (which is retrieved from the above query)<\/p>\n
Start-ManagedFolderAssistant <MainArchive Location><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
In simple terms – both your Recoverable Items and Archive size is increased with each additional auxiliary archive. However, the quotas remain the same at the mailbox level. This is because the total combined (or aggregate) size is increased. As the archive is expanding, content (capped at 50% OA size) from the OA is moved into the auxiliary archives. Because of this, the main archive folder and the recoverable items folder never \u201cincrease\u201d in size.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also important to note mailboxes which are on Litigation Hold have their main archive and recoverable items quota automatically increased to 110GB each. Whereas, mailboxes which do not have Litigation Hold enabled have the following limits set on them: archive size at 100GB and recoverable items at 30GB.<\/p>\n
Microsoft is currently exploring ways to provide solutions for this scenario, but unfortunately, this scenario is currently not supported.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Office365 (O365), Online Archive\u2019s (OA) have a maximum size limit of 100GB. To manage the size of OA\u2019s, Microsoft has provided a feature called \u201cAuto-expanding archiving\u201d (AEA) or more commonly referred to as \u201cUnlimited Archiving\u201d (UA). Now when you hear UA, you\u2019d expect the archive to, well, not have any limits. Unfortunately, this is… Continue reading Unlimited Archiving with Limits<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":2088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-professional-services","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37543,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2087\/revisions\/37543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}