In-Place Archive: Unlimited Email Storage
Is your mailbox full? If you are using the Microsoft 365 (Office 365) email services, you can get an additional email storage of 50 GB. If you use one of their enterprise plans, such as the Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, you can get an additional email storage of 1.5 TB. And you don’t have to pay extra to use it. Read on to find out more about it.
Enabling the In-Place Archive Feature
In-Place Archive is a relatively lesser-known feature of the Microsoft 365 email service (Exchange Online). By default, this feature is disabled. It can be turned on from Exchange Administration Console (EAC) or PowerShell. You need to request your sysadmin to enable this feature for you.
Once it is enabled, you can see it in the Outlook web application (https://outlook.office.com). As you can see in the screenshot, it will show up as “In-Place Archive” in the left navigation panel (highlighted inside the rectangle with the green border). It is not to be confused with the “Archive” folder inside your Inbox.
Depending on your Microsoft 365 plan, the In-Place Archive may expand your mail storage space by 50 GB or more. If you are using the Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 plans, you can expand your archive storage all the way up to 1.5 TB. You can immediately start moving your emails from your Inbox to the In-Place Archive folder. You can also use a retention policy that automatically moves emails from Inbox to the archive.
Archive Storage Limits for Various Microsoft 365 Plans
It is necessary to understand the limitations of archive storage before you begin to use it.
As you can see in the table, if you are using the Microsoft E3 or E5, or the Exchange Online Plan 2, you can get up to 1.5 TB of In-Place Archive storage. For most people, this is much more than they are ever going to need.
A Note for Outlook Desktop Users
If you use the Outlook desktop application, you need a specific edition of Outlook to access the In-Place Archive feature.
- Microsoft 365 Enterprise E3/E5 or
- Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise
- Microsoft Office Professional Plus (volume license)
Users of other editions, such as Microsoft Office Home and Business, Microsoft Office Standard, etc., cannot access the In-Place Archive feature in the desktop version. They must use the Outlook web version to access the In-Place Archive.
Please note that every user can access the In-Place Archive from the Outlook web application (https://outlook.office.com), irrespective of which desktop application they use.
What is the Catch?
There is no catch. You get a minimum of 50 GB and up to 1.5 TB of additional storage for storing older emails without making any extra payment.
The only downside we see is that the In-Place Archive is slow. We don’t have any implementation details, but we suspect the archive storage is deployed on a secondary infrastructure having comparatively less bandwidth and slower storage.
So, moving your emails from Inbox to In-Place Archive is a slow process. If you are doing it manually, you may need to be patient. Instead, we recommend using an appropriate retention policy to automate the process.
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