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TravisLaira's avatar
TravisLaira
Copper Contributor
Apr 10, 2019
Solved

Archive a 55GB Mailbox

Dear Team, A user within my company has a mailbox of 55GB size. We wish to archive all the emails as pst file. However using the export as pst option created a file of 191GB (and counting) as a res...
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  • msExchangeDude's avatar
    msExchangeDude
    May 10, 2019

    TravisLaira 

    Hello Travis. One method that I have used in the past to break up a large PST is to use a contentFilter to export only a few weeks or months at a time. For example look at the creation date on the mailbox 

    get-mailbox myArchiveMailbox | fl *creat*

     

    or use best guess for how far back the mail data goes. then create mailboxexportRequests for each 

     

    New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox myArchiveMailbox -ContentFilter {(Sent -gt "05/01/2019") -AND (Sent -lt "05/10/2019")} -filepath "\\myFileServer01\d$\breakout01.pst" -batchname "myArchiveBreakout" -baditemlimit 500 -acceptLargeDataLoss

     

    this would create a mailboxexport to breakout01.pst on fileserver myFileServer01, d: drive. for all mail sent from may 1st to may 10 (at 12:00am). without a time specified, it will equal 12:00am. 

     

    I have used this method in the past to do exactly what you are asking, without 3rd party tools. You hopefully do not need to create too many of these but if you do, let me know and I can help you script out the creation of several hundreds of these (i.e. every 2 weeks for a 2 year process). 

     

    Finally, with several dozen exports queued up, you can check the status with:

    get-mailboxexportRequest -batchname "myArchiveBreakout"

    and

    get-mailboxexportRequest -batchname "myArchiveBreakout" | get-mailboxexportRequestStatistics

     

    Best of Luck!

Chagus's avatar
Chagus
Copper Contributor
May 11, 2019

TravisLaira 

You can use Content Search under Security and Compliance and export the result into a PST file.

 

Before performing the content search make sure you or the administrator who is going to perform the exporting are a member of the permissions Compliance Administrator, eDiscovery Manager, Organization Management. This can be done through Admins > Security & Compliance > Permissions. Configuration replication may take a while so please expect that these setting may no propagate immediately.

 

To perform the Content Search

 

  1. Admins > Security & Compliance > Search & Investigation
  2. Click the "+" Button
  3. Provide it with a name for you to remember.
  4. Put the name of the person you want to search
  5. Click Search

 

This should take a while. After the search you can preview the search results and/or export on the right panel. Export them to PST and you can open this PST on Outlook which can then be sent to your attorney.