The Recoverable Items folder is the storage location where items deleted from the Deleted Items folder are stored until they’re purged from the Mailbox database.
Exchange will retain all deleted and modified data for the time specified in the retention policy or until the storage quota is exceeded.
This storage could be used for recovering accidentally deleted emails or for legal retention requirements.
By default, a mailbox database is configured to retain deleted items for 14 days, and the Recoverable Items warning quota and Recoverable Items quota are set to 20 gigabytes (GB) and 30 GB respectively.
How to increase Recoverable Items quotas for a mailbox database (EMS)
Using the Exchange Management Shell, you can configure message retention using the ‘Set-MailboxDatabase’ commandlet.
It needs to be applied to each mailbox database.
The command will modify the message retention for the database ‘MailDB1’ to:
- Recoverable Items Warning: 50 GB
- Recoverable Items Quota: 100 GB
Set-MailboxDatabase -Identity MailDB1 -RecoverableItemsWarningQuota 50GB -RecoverableItemsQuota 100GB
How to increase deleted item retention for a mailbox database
Using the Exchange Management Shell, you can configure message retention using the ‘Set-MailboxDatabase’ commandlet.
It needs to be applied to each mailbox database.
The command will modify the message retention for the database ‘MailDB1’ to:
- Deleted Items Retention: 60 days
Set-MailboxDatabase -Identity MailDB1 -DeletedItemRetention 60