I want to be able to remove disabled (retired) users mailboxes from ever-growing store, and archive them, in order to reclaim the space from our dedicated Disabled Users database. If this is possible, we would be able to periodically take the database offline in order to defragment it, and would therefore not need to keep storing retired mailboxes on our expensive production SAN storage. Ive tried doing this in a test to no avail (as it cannot find the Exchange attributes for the users), I have also tried to restore a mailbox from recovery Storage Group to a temporary mailbox folder . However this is exactly how it appears on the client as recovered data in a separate mailbox. Does anyone know if there's a way of removing mailboxes for users disabled in AD, and then being able to restore the data directly to the re-enabled users mailbox (or to another mailbox if necessary)? Thanks. JPSR.

The best way i could think of take PST.So, whenever you need the data, you can either import it to the mailbox or just add it to the outlook and view the contents.Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3

I had thought of that, but had hoped there might be a less primitive way to do it it E2k7. Thanks very much anyway for the reply.

Yes, Restore-Mailbox will merge the data to Recovered folder if it is not being restored original mailbox but you are restoring it to original mailbox then it doesn't go to new folder. This is expected behaviour. Lets say you want to recover data from Johns old mailbox to his new mailbox name John2, you can run below command to extract data to recovery folder. Restore-Mailbox -Identity John2 -RSGDatabase MyRSGDatabase -RSGMailbox John -TargetFolder Recovery http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125218(EXCHG.80).aspx Amit Tank | MVP - Exchange | MCITP:EMA MCSA:M | http://ExchangeShare.WordPress.com

Yes, as Amit said you can try the Restore-Mailbox cmdlet as well.Arun Kumar | MCSE - 2K3 + Messaging | ITIL-F V3