Where I work, when someone leaves we run through an out-process where one of the steps is to backup the users emailbox to a .pst before removing it from the system. Since storage is cheap its always nice to have a backup of your backups. Performing a process like that is easy enough when its a local exchange server, “export-mailbox”, not really that much too it. What about when its from Office 365?
In order to run through this super simple process I am going to make the assumption that you alreaady have an admin account of some kind with rights over the mailboxes, if you don’t we can always go through that 3 minutes of work as well.![02](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%20120%20167'%3E%3C/svg%3E)
First thing you need to do is get into your Office 365 Administration and launch the Exchange admin console. If you arent familier with where that is, at least in my Admin view its in a colapsed menu, look down the left side and expand “Admin Centers” and you will see it.
Once in the Exchange Admin Center you have to look for the section called “compliance management” and select it. That doesn’t seem like what we would need but we have to take the route through this section to create a query to give us something to actually export to that .pst.
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The default selection of “in-place eDiscovery & hold” is what you need here. Its important to note that this is used for the eDiscovery part, nothing is going to be put on hold just to run an export of the mailbox. From here there needs to be an actual query made but the helpful people at Microsoft have made a really simple wizard to get that done. Click on the + above the result grid to begin the wizard.
The wizard will start with a screen that just wants to you to give it a name, be descriptive because the actual step, which is the export, will use this name. The next screen will be where the actual user is selected. Select “Specify mailboxes to search”, click the + and in the popup box select your user. ![06](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%20503%20386'%3E%3C/svg%3E)
The next screen will allow for some criteria. For the purpose of archiving an entire mailbox off the system this doesn’t help to much, but if there is a reason to search for something a little more specific for some reason, say all communication to and from a certain address then this is where that would be done.
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Clicking Next will bring you to the hold setting option. In this case there is no reason to
hold the email, actually just the opposite for us at the moment, we want it gone. Again though, for sure there are situations where this might be needed and if so this is where its done.
Depending on the amount of email that a user has this query might be fast or it might take a while. Click on the listing for your query and you will get the info if its done or not. If you have a user with a lot of email, be patient.
Once the query is done then you can download the .pst. Make sure you have the user selected and click the download button. Your machine will grab the eDiscovery PST Export Tool and run it via ClickOnce (warning! if you are using a browser other than IE or Edge you may need to add that extension). The utility is simple and straight forward, just select where you want the files to be saved and start the export.