Exchange Web Services (EWS) is approaching end of service in Exchange Online. We first announced this change was coming in 2018, when we announced that Exchange Web Services (EWS) will no longer rece...
Updated Mar 17, 2026
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Please correct me, if I'm wrong. Enterprises must move away from EXO public folders before EWS is shut down, because as of now there is no possibility for proper backup and restore afterwards.
- Greg Taylor - EXCHANGE
Microsoft
That's not really accurate, though getting away from Public Folders is something I would very much agree with.
You don't need to back them up I would argue because we already have 4 copies of your PF data anyway (as we do with all mailbox data), which is a good starting point. And you have things like dumpster, retention and holds to protect too. And, the one I think you are really most interested in, is we will soon be shipping import/export APIs on Graph for PF data, so you can take the 20 years of data we already have 4 copies of that no-one touches, and pay a vendor to store another copy (often in Azure), just in case.
If you don't use PFs, you don't need to backup the data. That's the best way to solve this. So I would agree, moving away from EXO public folders is a great idea.
