How to Export an Exchange Mailbox to PST

Step-by-Step Guide with PowerShell & Best Alternatives

This article will guide you on how to export a mailbox in Exchange Server. We will be exploring how to create a new mailbox export, view the export results, and modify the exports that are not successful or still ongoing. We will also discuss an Exchange EDB to PST Converter software that you can use to export Exchange mailbox PST, Live Exchange, or Office 365 accounts directly.

Step 1- Assign Permissions

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, navigating to the Permissions button, clicking on Admin Roles, adding the Import/ Export role, and adding the user to the group. This is not instant, so you might need to wait sometime until the role is fully assigned.

Step 2- Create the share on the Server

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, for example, D:PSTFiles. You would need to provide the export with the UNC path example srv01pst, and you would need to assign the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group with full permissions to the folder and share. Alternatively, you can create a share using an admin share like srv01d$pst.

With the above steps, you are set for the export. In all applications and in previous Exchange versions, there are two ways of exporting a mailbox, i.e., via the

1. Exchange Admin Center or
2. By using PowerShell

Method 1 – Exchange Admin Center

Let’s start off by going through the Exchange Admin Center. Once you log into the Exchange Admin Center, click on Recipients on your left-side menu and mailboxes.

1. Click on the More button near the refresh button
2. Click on the Export to a PST file feature.

The wizard will open, and you will be asked for the mailbox to export. The method will export only the mailbox content or the archive mailbox.

Click the Next button. Here, you will be asked for the full UNC path for the PST file example srv01pstmy.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 an ideal way to check the progress of the export at this stage as there will only be a notification viewer to check the status of the export.

You can check in this video-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SleWctduU8&t=485s

Method 2 – 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, such as the exclusion/inclusion of folders and date range. Hopefully, this will be available from the PowerShell command using the New-MailboxExportRequest. The default command to do this is as follows:

New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath srv01pstmy.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 use the IncludeFolder option to include one or more folders in the mailbox. To filter multiple folders, you can use the commas and specify multiple ones.

New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath srv01pstmy.user.pst -IncludeFolder “#Inbox#”, “#Projects#”

To exclude folders, one can replace the includes folder with ExcludeFolder, as shown below.

New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath \srv01pstmy.user.pst -ExcludeFolder “#Spam#”, “#RSS#”

Another option one can use is the –ContentFilter option to have a date range. There are various ways to do this, but the most commonly used are the ones 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 \srv01pstmy.user.pst -Content Filter {(Received –gt ‘01/01/2018)}

This will export all emails that are later than the first of January 2018. In the example below, you can see a date range example where any emails between the first of January 2019 and the first of January 2018 will be exported to PST.

New-MailboxExportRequest –Mailbox my.user –FilePath srv01pstmy.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, though 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.

Visit this detailed guide on exporting an Exchange mailbox to PST for step-by-step instructions across all Exchange versions.

Later, you can Import PST Files into Exchange Mailboxes using New-MailboxImportRequest in PowerShell or via the Exchange Admin Center (EAC).

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 a free preview of the converted PST file now.