Archiving strategy for Exchange public folders

Since items in public folders are usually there for many people to read, some of the options that are acceptable for individual users are not appropriate.

The main control you have for public folders is the age at which you archive items. For example, you could decide to archive items that have been unmodified for 60 days, rather than 90 days. If the items are likely to be in frequent use, though, archiving them too soon means that users will frequently be retrieving them.

You can also control archiving by size and there is also a minimum age limit, below which items are not archived.

For example, you could use the following combination of settings, which would have the effect of archiving all items larger than 10 MB:

Never archive items younger than 0 days
Start with items larger than 10 MB
Archive remaining items, taking oldest items first and stopping when all items older than 99 years are archived

As an alternative, you could use the following settings, which would have the effect of archiving all items older than 90 days, but would first remove items larger than 5 MB and older than 60 days:

Never archive items younger than 60 days
Start with items larger than 5 MB
Archive remaining items, taking oldest items first and stopping when all items older than 90 days are archived

You can also, however, choose to archive larger items sooner than smaller items. The setting is in the Exchange Public Folder Policy.

Also, if storage space is really important to you, you could decide not to keep safety copies of archived items.

The types of items to archive are defined in the Directory.