Legal Hold in Exchange Server 2010

Legal Hold feature can be used to preserve mailbox items deleted be the users (soft or hard deletion), and placing mailboxes on hold as well.

Unlike previous Exchange versions which use dumpster, Exchange Server 2010 uses a new feature called, Recoverable Items Folder for legal hold. The Recoverable Item Folder is hidden by default to the users when they try to view it from Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Web App or any other e-mail clients. When a message is soft or hard deleted by a user, that message is moved to the Recoverable Items Folder, and from that it can be recovered within 14 days, by default.

User and Recoverable Items Folder have their own quota in Exchange Server 2010. An Application log event is generated on the Mailbox server when Recoverable Items Folders exceeds its warning level of quota. The default RecoverableItemsWarningQuota is 20GB whereas; default RecoverableItemsQuota value is set to 30GB. We can change these values by using Set-MailboxDatabase Cmdlet.