Yes, I asked this already in the 8.5 forum, but I am asking it here as well..  Please don't kill me for it.

OK, I have a couple questions.  I am using server based archiving via policies.  I have used this for years and it works pretty well, but, the retention portion of the policy is misleading.  It makes one believe that documents older then the max retention period would not be archived and would instead be deleted.  However, this appears to NOT be the case.

So, how do I do retention on archives?  Well, my solution is to put archive settings on the archive files themselves.  The problem is that you have to do this to each and every archive database by hand.  Is there a way to copy the archive profile from one database to another easily?  Is there a tool that will do this, like Powertools?

Here is what I am trying to do.  Archive documents from the user's mail database that are older then 120 days.  This is EASILY done through policies right now.  The harder part is limiting the archive databases so that they have no documents in them older then 42 months.  I got around this by manually adding archive settings to the archive databases that just deletes any documents older then 42 months, from the archive databases.  I then targeted the folder containing the archive databases with the compact -A command.

Am I missing something here?  Is this the best or only way to do what I am trying to do?

IBM, can you make it so that the retention settings in the policy do what I am doing manually?  I can not be the only admin that expected that the retention settings would actually enforce a maximum age restriction for documents in the archives.

Thanks for reading...  Any help would be appreciated.