The first step is to have the right permissions with the user you are exporting the mailboxes with. For this you require the Mailbox Import Export role assigned to the user by adding the role in the Exchange Admin Center, navigate the to the Permissions button and click on Admin Roles, Add the Import/ Export role and add the user in the group. This is not instant so you might need to wait some time until the role is fully assigned.
Once you have taken a short break, the next step is to create the share on the server where you will be storing the exported PST files. You need to create a share on the server or device as you cannot export a PST file to example D:\PSTFiles, you would need to provide the export with the UNC path example \srv01\pst and you would need to assign the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group with full permissions to the folder and share. Alternatively, of creating a share you can use the admin share like \srv01\d$\pst.
With the above steps, you are set for the export. In all application and in previous Exchange versions there are two ways of exporting a mailbox i.e. via the
Exchange Admin Center or
By using PowerShell.
Exchange Admin Center
Let’s start off by going through the Exchange Admin Center. Once you logged into the Exchange Admin Center click on Recipients on your left side menu and mailboxes.
Click on the more button near the refresh button
- Click on the Export to a PST file feature.
The wizard will open and you will be asked for the mailbox to export and the method being exporting only the mailbox content or only the archive mailbox.
Click the Next button. Here you will be asked the full UNC path for the PST file example \srv01\pst\my.user.pst and click on the Next button. Here you will be asked if you would like to receive a notification by email when the operation finishes and to whom. When ready click on Finish. The process will start and unfortunately, there isn’t a very ideal way to check the progress of the export at this stage as there will be only a notification viewer to check the status of the export.
PowerShell command
If you would like to check the progress then you would need to use the PowerShell command of Get-MailboxExportRequest
From the GUI of Exchange, this is it. Some things are missing which are exclusion/inclusion of folders and date range. Hopefully, for us, this is available from the PowerShell command using the New-MailboxExportRequest. The default command to do this is as follow
New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath \srv01\pst\my.user.pst
This is the basic command which mimics the one from the GUI. Now if you want to add some basic filtering you can by using the IncludeFolder option to include one or more folders in the mailbox. To filter multiple folders you can use the comma and specify multiple ones.
New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath \srv01\pst\my.user.pst -IncludeFolder "#Inbox#", "#Projects#"
To exclude folders one can either replace the includes folder with ExcludeFolder as below.
New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath \\srv01\pst\my.user.pst -ExcludeFolder "#Spam#", "#RSS#"
Another option one can use is the –ContentFilter option to have a date range. There are various ways how to do this but the most commonly used are the greater than if you want to export any email from a particular day onwards or export emails in between a date range. This can be achieved from the examples below.
New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath \\srv01\pst\my.user.pst -Content Filter {(Received –gt ‘01/01/2018)}
This will export all emails which are later than first January 2018. In the example below, you can see a date range example where any emails between first January 2019 and first January 2018 will be exported to PST.
New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath \srv01\pst\my.user.pst -Content Filter {(Received –lt ‘01/01/2019) –and (Received –gt ‘01/01/2018)}
Once this is done and you start processing you can see the results and progress of the export using the Get-MailboxExportRequest PowerShell command, thou this will just show in progress, complete or successful. If you have a few mailboxes you can just do it for each user but if you have a good number of mailboxes to export you would need to use the Get-Mailbox along with the pipe and New-MailboxExportRequest command. This will load all the mailboxes and for each line, it will export the mailboxes. Keep in mind the performance of the server as having a lot of exports will hinder the drive’s performance.
Best Alternative
Having such an admin burden can be annoying and third party applications come in handy to ease the job. With Stellar Converter for EDB you can easily convert EDB to PST, from an offline or online mailbox database, explore and browse all the mailboxes, export to PST and other formats, export to an Exchange Server and export to Office 365. Apart from this, you will be able to create various export search criteria like subject, date, folders and much more. Don’t complicate your administrative work when you can do it in less time and have more time for research and development. You can try now free preview the converted pst file now!!
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