Hi All,<o:p></o:p>

I have about 500 mailboxes on Exchange 2010 that I have to move to different physical location via 20Mbps link. Before move I would like to downsize all mailboxes mean archive to arhive.pst. I would like to use Auto archive or in some cases where mailbox is really big (40G) Manual archive for more control. For Auto archive I am going to use GPO and apply to most of the users but Im afraid that this will start archiving number of email boxes at the same time and choke my site to site connection (some sites have 2Mbps link to datacenter only)<o:p></o:p>

What I really want to know does Auto or Manual archive moves email from OST to PST directly or downloads emails from server to archive.pst then sync ost? <o:p></o:p>

I took my computer offline (completely disconnect from network) and did manual archive and it archived all items that I wanted. Can I just disconnect from network users with big mailboxes, archive emails offline then reconnect to Exchange to avoid downloading GB od email via slow internet link<o:p></o:p>

Thanks<o:p></o:p>

Wilson<o:p></o:p>

Why don't you build the new mailbox server in the remote location, add it to the DAG, and then manually seed the databases there?

There is already second Exchange 2010 server installed in remote datacenter. Local Exchange server and whole datacenter is going down as soon as all mailboxes and other services are migrated. There wasn't a mailbox size limit so many users grow their mailboxes to 40+G and plan is to clean up their mailboxes and limit the mailbox size to 4G on remote server databases. Thai is the reason behind archiving<o:p></o:p>

Thanks