As an Exchange Server administrator, you may need to import PST files to mailboxes or export mailboxes to PST files. These may range from compliance reasons to mailbox backup, free server resources to mailbox migration, and more. The methods to export mailboxes to PST can be distinct. For instance, you can use manual methods like Exchange Admin Center (EAC) or Exchange Management Shell (EMS) to serve this cause.
To avoid any type of complications, you may also choose professional EDB to PST converter software. When opting for manual ways, you cannot directly export the mailboxes to PST. Instead, it will require you to have the management role added to a role group, as it does not exist by default. Let’s have a detailed insight into this topic.
Reasons to export mailboxes to PST
Different reasons can prompt you to run these requests. Here are a few prominent ones:
- Compliance purposes: The export may be necessary due to legal discovery purposes.
- Selected mailbox backup: You would like to export a few selected mailboxes to PST files to avoid keeping a backup of an entire mailbox database.
- Employee offboarding: Organizations often export mailboxes of the Offboarded employees to an offline storage device or PST. This allows them to delete their live mailboxes and free the server resources.
- Migration of mailboxes: Admins export mailboxes in small numbers across different Exchange versions or to external sources as a part of their migration process.
Add a management role to a role group
To continue with this process, you must have the “Mailbox Import Export” role assigned to your account, as it is not assigned to a role group by default. You may do it with the help of Exchange Management Shell (EMS) or Exchange Admin Center (EAC). Here are the steps via EAC.
- Open EAC, and click Permissions > Admin Roles
- Look for the role groups and select the one to which you want to assign a role
- Click the Edit icon to enter the Roles section
- Choose your preferred roles you want to assign to the role group
- Once finished, click Save
Here, it is crucial to note that adding roles to a role group through EAC won’t be possible if you have used EMS to configure exclusive scopes or multiple management roles on the role group. In any such condition, you must use only EMS to add roles to the role group.
The step-by-step mailbox export request procedure
Here is how you can use Exchange Admin Center to export Mailboxes to PST:
- Open EAC and login with your account credentials
- Navigate to Recipients > Mailboxes > More Options (…)
- Select Export to a PST file to open the wizard.
- In the resulting Export to a PST file dialog box, click the Browse button to select the source mailbox
Choose any of the following options:
- Export only the contents of this mailbox
- Export only the contents of this mailbox’s archive.
- Click Next after selecting the suitable option
- The next dialog box will need you to provide the name of the target PST file and its UNC path
- Click next to enter the last page to get the option Send email to the mailbox below when the .pst file has been exported with a checkbox
- If you want to leave the checkbox selected, click Browse to add or remove notification recipients and click Finish
- Else, clear the checkbox and click Finish
After finishing the job, you would like to check if your procedure has worked as intended. The subsequent sections will show how to verify the request in EAC and EMS.
Verify the success of the procedure in EAC
These steps above will export your mailboxes to PST. If you want to confirm the success of the mailbox export request:
- Click the notification viewer in the EAC to check the request status
- While creating the mailbox export request through EAC, if you had opted to send notification email messages, go through the notification messages. Check the following:
- Sender name: Microsoft Exchange
- Subject of the first message: Your Export PST request has been received.
- A successful export request will show the following message: Export PST has finished
Verify the success of the procedure in EMS
You can modify, suspend, resume, and remove the export requests through distinct EMS cmdlets. Here is a brief description:
1. Get-MailboxExportRequest
You may use Get-MailboxExportRequest to view the progress of the mailbox export request. It will verify the basic property values, show error logs, and fetch real-time progress of the request. Here is the command:
Get-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox “<MailboxIdentity>” | Format-List Name,FilePath,Mailbox,Status
Likewise, to verify the details of the request, you may use Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics
Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics -Identity “<MailboxIdentity>\<MailboxExportRequestName>”
It will return the name, status, and alias of the source mailbox, along with the completion percentage of the mailbox export request.
Additionally, in the follow-up to the mailbox export request, several related tasks to manage the progress of the request are possible through only EMS cmdlets. You cannot use EAC to execute them. Here are some of them.
2. Set-MailboxExportRequest
This cmdlet modifies the mailbox export requests that have not completed. Here is the command to modify the request:
Set-MailboxExportRequest -Identity <MailboxIdentity>\<MailboxExportRequestName> [-BadItemLimit <value>] [-LargeItemLimit <value>] [-AcceptLargeDataLoss]
3. Suspend-MailboxExportRequest
It will suspend an under progress mailbox export request. However, it will not affect a failed or already finished request. The command is as follows:
Suspend-MailboxExportRequest -Identity <MailboxIdentity>\<MailboxExportRequestName> [-SuspendComment “<Descriptive Comment>”]
4. Resume-MailboxExportRequest
It helps to resume a suspended or failed mailbox export request. Here is the syntax
Resume-MailboxExportRequest -Identity <MailboxIdentity>\<MailboxExportRequestName>
5. Remove-MailboxExportRequest
It can remove partially or fully completed mailbox export requests. Here is the command to remove a specific request:
Remove-MailboxExportRequest -Identity <MailboxExportRequestName>
Using it with Get-MailboxExportRequest will remove all the completed mailbox export requests, as shown below:
Get-MailboxExportRequest -Status Completed | Remove-MailboxExportRequest
Limitations of using manual methods for mailbox export to PST
While the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the Exchange Admin Center or the EMS cmdlets can export mailboxes to PST, they have several limitations:
Limitations of EAC
- Inability to export a specific mailbox item from the mailbox
- The EAC GUI does not have any method to check and verify the progress of the mailbox export
- It does not allow exporting public folders, you need to export each mailbox individually
- To export mailboxes by EAC, the database must be mounted on the server
- At times, the process can go extremely slow without any specific reason
To get away these issues, you can switch to Exchange Management Shell cmdlets, but it accompanies several other drawbacks.
Limitations of EMS
- Manual entry of the commands is prone to errors,
- There is no way to calculate the time required for the completion of a large export.
- Both the mailbox database and the Exchange Server containing it must be online and healthy.
- You have to start a completely new request to update an existing PST file
- You should possess deep technical knowledge to perform the export
To overcome the drawbacks encountered during both these methods, admins prefer switching over to using professional EDB to PST converter software. Notably, Stellar Converter for EDB can be a feasible choice in this regard, alongside many other options available in the market.
Conclusion
You may need to export exchange mailboxes to a PST file due to legal requirements, mailbox migration, database backup, or some other reason. In any case, you will need to have a management role assigned to the role group. Once you do that, you can proceed to export the mailboxes in the Exchange Admin Center or Exchange Management Shell. While the EAC GUI is user-friendly, it can still cause delays in export without any clear justification.
Likewise, using EMS cmdlets will require you to have settled technical knowledge. It may still cause errors due to manual entry of the commands, and can consume too much time without the assurance of success. Using an automated and professional EDB to PST converter software, such as Stellar Converter for EDB, can be a thinkable option to overcome these drawbacks. The tool exports the mailbox with success and does not need you to mount the Exchange Server database for the job.
