I recently acquired a company and now I need to combine their Office 365 tenant with ours, which should be manageable. However, I've encountered a significant challenge: some users have excessively large email archives. For example, one user has a staggering 300GB of archived emails. The previous company enforced a strict email archiving policy, which kept individual mailboxes small, roughly 1GB each, due to automatic archiving every month if the mailbox exceeded that size.
The typical migration processes seem inadequate for this situation. I'm reaching out to see if anyone else has dealt with a similar issue and can share some strategies or ideas for handling this.
4 Answers
One approach is to consider relaxing the email archiving policy. You could ingest PST files into Outlook for now; otherwise, you might end up repeating this migration in the future. Just make sure there are no business or legal implications involved with that policy change.
I totally get what you're going through. Managing so many critical emails can be overwhelming. Some industries have legal requirements to retain project-related emails for years, which makes things even trickier. Just be prepared for the complexity of deciding what can be disposed of when!
Using a Synology NAS combined with Microsoft 365 backup is a solid plan. This allows you to secure all data, including archives, and set up a retention policy to clean up archived emails. Plus, with the Synology portal, users can still access their archived emails through a browser if needed.
That’s actually a really smart idea! I hadn’t thought about using a NAS for this.
Using a reputable mail migration tool can make this process much smoother. I’ve had good experiences with Avepoint Fly. You might also need to reach out to Microsoft support to pre-expand the archive mailbox in the destination tenant before migrating the data.
That makes sense, but we should ensure we’re compliant with any legal retention requirements before making those changes.