Export Exchange mailbox to PST with PowerShell

It’s useful to export Exchange mailbox to PST. For example, an employee is leaving the organization, and you want to archive the mailbox to a PST file. By default, no user can import and export to PST file in Exchange Server. You need the role permissions before you can do that. In this article, you will learn how to export Exchange mailbox to PST with PowerShell.

Information exporting Exchange mailbox to PST file

Exporting an Exchange on-premises mailbox is different than exporting an Office 365 mailbox. Are you looking at how to export an Office 365 mailbox to PST file? Read the article: Export Office 365 mailbox to PST.

In the article, we will export an Exchange on-premises mailbox. The steps that we will take are:

1. Check if the account has role permission
2. Create a network folder for the PST export
3. Export the mailbox to a PST file
4. Remove role permissions

Check Mailbox Import Export role permission

The Mailbox Import Export management role enables administrators to import and export mailbox content and purge unwanted content from a mailbox. Therefore, we need to have access to the Mailbox Import Export role. If we don’t have access, we can’t export PST files from Exchange Server.

I wrote an article about it. Read more about New-MailboxExportRequest is not recognized.

After you have the role assigned, you will have permission to export PST in Exchange. See the next step of creating a network share folder.

Create a network folder for the PST export

If we export the mailbox data to PST file, it needs to be saved to a folder. We will create a folder with the correct permissions.

Create a folder named PST in your C: drive. Right-click the PST folder and click properties.

Select the tab Sharing and click Advanced Sharing…

Enable Share this folder. Click Permissions.

Add the Exchange Trusted Subsystem group with Change/Read permissions.

Add the SYSTEM account with Full Control permissions. Click OK.

Now that you have created a network share for the PST files, you can export the mailbox to PST in Exchange.

Export Exchange mailbox to PST with PowerShell

List the mailboxes if you don’t have the name of the mailbox name. It will list all the mailboxes in the organization.

[PS] C:\>Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited

Name                      Alias                ServerName       ProhibitSendQuota
----                      -----                ----------       -----------------
Administrator             Administrator        ex01-2016        Unlimited
Amanda Morgan             amanda.morgan        ex01-2016        Unlimited
Anna Welch                anna.welch           ex01-2016        Unlimited
Benetiz Anees             benetiz.anees        ex01-2016        Unlimited
Boris Campbell            boris.campbell       ex01-2016        Unlimited

Important: Did you assign permissions in the last part? Close Exchange Management Shell and rerun it for changes to take effect.

Ensure that you use the Alias when running the next command behind the -Mailbox parameter to export PST.

[PS] C:\>New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox "amanda.morgan" -FilePath "\\ex01-2016\pst\amanda.morgan.pst"

Name          Mailbox                                    Status
----          -------                                    ------
MailboxExport exoip.local/Company/Users/HR/Amanda Morgan Queued

Bulk export Exchange mailbox to PST with PowerShell

Run the command to bulk export Exchange mailboxes to PST.

[PS] C:\>foreach ($Mailbox in (Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited)) {New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox $Mailbox.DisplayName -FilePath "\\ex01-2016\PST\$($Mailbox.Alias).pst"}

Check mailbox export to PST status

Check the status of the export.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxExportRequest | Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics

Name          StatusDetail SourceAlias   PercentComplete
----          ------------ -----------   ---------------
MailboxExport Completed    amanda.morgan 100

If you only want to filter on completed status.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxExportRequest -Status Completed

Name          Mailbox                                    Status
----          -------                                    ------
MailboxExport exoip.local/Company/Users/HR/Amanda Morgan Completed

The export of the mailbox to PST is 100% complete. Let’s verify by going to the network share path.

Now that you verified the export to a PST file in the folder, you can clear the completed export request statistics. Confirm with Y and press Enter.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxExportRequest -Status Completed | Remove-MailboxExportRequest

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Removing completed request 'exoip.local/Company/Users/HR/Amanda Morgan\MailboxExport'.
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [?] Help (default is "Y"): Y

The completed export statistics are successfully cleared.

Remove role permissions

Now that you finished the PST export, it’s good to remove the assigned permissions to the role. Read the article New-MailboxExportRequest is not recognized.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned how to export Exchange mailbox to PST with PowerShell. The next time will be much faster now that you followed the article and did a mailbox export to PST in Exchange. That’s because we walked you through the export Exchange mailbox to PST step by step. Don’t forget to remove the assigned role permissions when the PST export finishes.

The documentation by Microsoft gives you extra information regarding mailbox exports to PST files in Exchange Server. Did you enjoy this article? You may also like Repair corrupted mailbox Exchange. Don’t forget to follow us and share this article.