I know I that I posted this on Friday and it's only been one working weekday since my post, but I'm just bringing it up again as a reminder that there should be a technical article on this. I have six years worth of message archive data for a few clients, and one domain alone is storing about 130 GB of archived email. As you may imagine, It isn't unreasonable to expect many SM admins are faced with this storage issue as archives continuously grow and will eventually outstrip server capacity thus requiring expansion/migration. Since I am now in the process of moving all archived message data to a separate partition from the message store, it will be easier to manage the storage subsystem in future.

 

However, I think that at the minimum there should be an approved procedure from SmarterTools on doing this. At best, SmarterTools should improve the process so that migration/move can be done from within the system, not just changing the path to the archive folder, but moving existing archive data from the old location to a new location.

 

The process I'm using works, but it's a bit of a hassle to restart the SM service every time I move a domain's archive location.

 

Thanks,

 

Matt

Might someone at SmarterTools explain why there are technical articles in the knowledge base on the process of moving the message store but none on moving message archives? If a customer is using archiving and needs to do a server migration, the customer is going to need steps to successfully move the archive as well as the message store. I have a procedure that works with minimal downtime, which I'm very happy to share, but the process is messy enough that SmarterTools really should come up with a better solution within SmarterMail which entails no downtime or services restart.

 

Matt

Hi Paul,

 

Basically, I just do a robocopy command on the mail server console like this:

 

robocopy x:\mailarchive\acme y:\mailarchive\acme /s

 

Drive letter Y: is the newly attached drive. The '/s' processes subfolders.

 

The copy job might take quite a while depending upon the size and time frame of the mail archive. After it finishes, I run the command again to pick up any new emails which might have arrived during the initial robocopy job. Once that finishes, I go into SmarterMail as sysadmin and modify the message archiving location for the Acme domain from x: to y:. After I save settings, I restart the SmarterMail service and it's done. Restarting the SM service is critical as SM will keep writing to the old archive location even though it was changed via the web interface! The first few times I did this, I renamed the old folder as \acmeold (after service restart) then went into message archive search and searched for mail. If SM was indexing and pointing to the new location properly,  you should get search results. Once I feel comfortable that the move worked, I'll delete the original archive folder for the domain in question.

 

Matt