Exchange online archiving offers a place to store older mail that you wish to keep. An archive mailbox is a specialized mailbox that appears alongside primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook on the web. Users can access the archive in the same way that they access their primary mailboxes. In addition, users can search both their archives and primary mailboxes.
The online archive does not count towards the mailbox storage limits. Additionally, archived email does not count towards UA’s total pooled Microsoft storage. Unlike PST files, data in the online archive mailbox is stored in the Office 365 cloud account and not on the personal computer. This will result in your archived data being available online through your Office 365 account even if your computer stops working. Learn more about archiving mail on Microsoft’s website. Microsoft and OIT do not recommend using PST files for archive storage.
Note: the Online Archive / In-Place Archive is not the same feature as the standard Outlook “Archive” folder. The standard Outlook Archive is simply a location to store old messages outside of the inbox and has no affect on storage thresholds. Please do not use the standard Outlook Archive folder; use the Online Archive instead.
To access your Online Archive:
Online archiving is an automated process that runs periodically on the email server itself. The “Managed Folder Assistant” process spends a certain amount of time per day per mailbox moving data from live mailboxes to archive mailboxes; therefore, email may not move on the exact specified date depending on the process workload.