Is this for a private individual or a company?

Naxian specialise in email archiving and fully understand your dilema.
Often a hiccup in a restore of email is the MS update, so watch out
for this.

Also Auto Archive will not return your settings - ie calendar, tasks
etc it will simply do a rather nice dump.

If this is a corporate dilema then ask what email archiving is being
done and ask when the last file backup was done. recovering from this
file back up, as one can do with ease in Naxian message Tracker,
ensures a quick and full restore of your email environment