ok here is my bone head story

we turned on a few In-Place Archives in Office 365 for a few users.

This morning the users notes and everything from over two years went into archive.

we then had a tech think oh we will just shut it off so he went in and disabled the in-place archive

how do I get those archives back so they can move the notes and messages back to their mailboxes?

Hi,

After disabling a personal archive, the archive mailbox becomes disconnected. A disconnected personal archive is retained in the mailbox database for a specified amount of time. By default, Exchange retains disconnected personal archives for 30 days. During this time, you can recover the personal archive by associating it with an existing mailbox.

Refer from:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj651146(v=exchg.150).aspx

Drag-n-Drop message from the archive to primary mailbox is a great and easy way to restore  messages.

Best Regards.