How to transition from journaling to rolling in-place hold for Exchange archiving

With Microsoft moving away from journaling how do we transition to relying on archiving the Recoverable Items folder in conjunction with rolling In-place holds on our Exchange system?

There are changes you will have to make in Exchange and Retain to make this transition go as smoothly as possible.

Mandatory Exchange Tasks:

• Enable Rolling In-Place Hold
  • Set up Rolling In-Place Holds on your Exchange system. There are two kinds of holds Exchange provides: In-Place and Litigation holds
  • In-Place holds allow for more flexibility but a Litigation hold will work as well for our purposes. To make it rolling you limit the time period that the hold lasts. We recommend a minumum of 90 days
  • You can test that the hold is properly enabled by going into Outlook or OWA and deleting an item, going into the recoverable items dialog and attempting to purge the item. It should end up in the Purges folder which the user cannot see but Retain can. So you will need to run an archive job against it to see it within Search Messages in Retain
  • In Exchange 2010 you would want to enable Single Item Recovery which allows you to set a rolling duration for holding deleted items.
    • Get-Mailbox | Set-Mailbox -SingleItemRecoveryEnabled $true -RetainDeletedItemsFor 90
• Disable Journal Rule in Exchange
  • Once the rolling in-place hold is enabled, you can disable the journal rule in Exchange.

Recommended Exchange Tasks:

• For best performance it is important to check that the Throttling policy is set correctly:
  • Exchange Throttling Policy and Bandwidth/Performance (2010)
  • Exchange Throttling Policy and Bandwidth/Performance (2013)
• Check Exchange Health
• Troubleshooting Exchange Performance
• Ports Used by Retain Open the necessary ports in your firewall.
• Useful Troubleshooting Tools for Windows Servers
• Repair Exchange Mailboxes

Mandatory Retain Tasks:

• Keep the existing Retain journaling job and allow that to run until the journal mailbox is empty.
  • If you are currently unable to archive your existing journal mailbox(es) because they have become too large for Exchange to manage, see our Exchange 2010 Powershell Scripts for Transferring Mail From Bloated Journal Mailboxes

• Create New Profile
  • The primary option to enable is Profile/Miscellaneous/"Include user's recoverable items". With this option enabled Retain will dredge each users recoverable items folder and all items and folders inside it, except the logs found in the Audits subfolder.

• Create a New Job(s)
  • If you have multiple Exchange databases we recommend one job per mailbox database and one worker per job so they can run in parallel. (Retain Technical Support has a PowerShell 4.0 script to make this easier)
  • Choosing a Particular Exchange Database

See Also:
You should also review the knowledgebase articles:

• Exchange Archiving Overview
• Exchange Archiving Strategies

This article was originally published in the GWAVA knowledgebase as article ID 2700.