Improving Archiving Performance Against Exchange DAG Cluster

We are archiving our Exchange system which is configured with in a DAG and it is taking longer than a day to archive.

A DAG replicates Exchange mailboxes across multiple servers as a way to provide data redundancy. However, if Retain is attempting to archive the entire system it will be spending most of its time trying to download redundant data.

To solve this it is important to choose only one server of the DAG which has all the mailboxes or the databases that contain one copy of the user mailboxes.

To do this go to Data Collection/Jobs and under the particular job choose the Mailboxes tab.
Expand the Mailservers and then the mailserver to expose the mailbox databases and choose the appropriate ones from your system.

This article was originally published in the GWAVA knowledgebase as article ID 2558.