Accessing Exchange Archive Mailboxes

Exchange Archive Mailboxes are one of the many welcome features in Exchange 2010 - 2019.  You can provision a user's archive mailbox to be located within:

This provides flexibility to use tiered storage architecture and to store archive mailboxes on a different storage subsystem, such as near-line storage.

Accessing an Archive Mailbox from Production Exchange Databases

When DigiScope is used to access production Exchange databases, the Archive Mailboxes are only accessible after the primary mailbox is connected to.  During the connection process, DigiScope will load the associated Archive Mailbox and present it within the DigiScope interface as Online Archive - <Username> as seen in the image below.

Prerequisites:

NOTE:  If the database that contains the Archive Mailbox is not mounted within Exchange, it will not appear within the DigiScope interface.

NOTE:  Attempting to utilize DigiScope to connect directly to an Production database that contains only Archive Mailboxes results in the following message: Not mounted or has no mailboxes to load.  If you want to access just the archive mailboxes without loading the primary mailbox, you can do so by mounting an offline copy of the appropriate database within the DigiScope offline pane.

Viewing an Archive Mailbox in the Offline Pane

In order to view an Archive Mailbox store/database in the Offline pane, you simply have to add the database that the archive itself resides in. The only mailboxes in the database should be the system mailboxes and the archived mailboxes unless you at some point manually added users to that database as well.

Licensing Differences Between Viewing Production and Offline Archives

Please note that the licensing is different for viewing archives in Production and those located Offline.  If you wish to view an archive in Production, the store/database that the user whose archive needs to be accessed resides in is the store/database that must be licensed.

However, if you wish to view the archives in Offline, then the database that the archives reside in must be licensed.