Manual Guide - Reconnect Disconnected Archive Mailbox in Exchange 2013

An archive mailbox entity in the database, which is not linked with an Active Directory client account is considered as disabled archive mailbox. Well, consider a following scenario that was shared by a user who recently came to know that some archive mailboxes are disconnected from his Exchange server account:
“I am operating the Exchange server 2013 version in my organization. Few days back, I came to know that some of the mailboxes were disconnected by an ex-employee, I ignored this news. But, unfortunately, an urgent need had occurred where at any cost I have to reconnect disconnected archive mailbox in Exchange 2013. Please someone suggest me a rapid solution for the same.”

Whenever a person disables the mailbox, it means that parameters of the Exchange mailbox is removed from user account of the corresponding Active directory but, the account is still continued. Until-and-unless, a disabled mailbox is not permanently deleted, it means that there is a hope to reconnect it with Active directory either through EMC or PowerShell commands. Therefore, without wasting a single minutes choose and implement any of the workaround to reconnect disabled archive mailbox in Exchange 2013 platform.
Prerequisite: Before implementing any of the solution, it is mandatory to activate mailbox permissions for successfully enabling the personal archive in account.

Connect a Disconnected Archive Mailbox via EAC

Go through the following set of instructions with which one can accomplish their job in Exchange 2013:

Reconnect Disabled Archive Mailbox via PowerShell

It is a genuine fact that users might not be knowing the actual name of the disabled archive mailbox. Therefore, they can use following commands to see the disabled archive mailboxes from a particular database:


where, DB01 is the name of mailbox database

Now, you can learn the name of disconnected archive mailbox and then, again link it in the Exchange 2013 server through the following command:


Here, we are connecting the Kelly Cohen’s mailbox to its primary items and applying GUID for identity of personal archive mailbox

A warning message window will display in front of you, which will notify that you have to wait for the Active Directory replication process to be finished.

Alternative Option over Manual

It might be possible that end users are finding it difficult to reconnect disconnected archive mailbox in Exchange 2013 through EMC or PowerShell commands. Therefore, one can go for Exchange Database Recovery Software, which is not only the way to resolve such problem but, a rapid and direct approach to link personal archive mailbox in the Exchange server. This workaround is involving extraction from dismounted and offline EDB files, enabling its client to perfectly accomplish job without any hassle any error.

Conclusion

Users should keep one thing in mind that if disabled archive mailboxes are out of the retention period then, it is impossible to manually retrieve them back. It is so because there is no copy left in Exchange 2013 from where any of the workaround can process the data. Apart from this, if one is finding it hard to implement the manual strategies then, they can go for the alternative solution i.e., Exchange recovery. This approach to reconnect disconnected archive mailbox in Exchange 2013 does not require any technical guidance for implementation and will throw any negative impact on all other programs available on the system.