Office 365 Mailbox Export to PST - Third Party Tools: What’s Your Experience?

Good point on the Purview distinction — it's a compliance tool first, not a backup solution, and that confusion catches a lot of teams out when they realize eDiscovery exports weren't designed for bulk PST backup workflows.

For large-scale or repeated PST exports, the native Outlook export works fine for individual mailboxes but falls apart quickly when you're dealing with dozens of mailboxes or need to run exports on a schedule. Purview eDiscovery gets the job done for compliance scenarios but the permission setup and case-based workflow adds overhead that's hard to justify for routine backup tasks.

In environments where bulk PST export is a regular requirement, some teams have had good results with tools like EdbMails Office 365 Migration, which handles bulk mailbox-to-PST export without needing PowerShell or eDiscovery case setup. It's worth evaluating alongside Veeam depending on whether your primary need is backup/recovery or straight PST export for archiving and migration prep.

That said, the right choice really does depend on the use case — if compliance chain-of-custody matters, staying within Purview makes sense regardless of the extra steps. If it's purely operational backup or pre-migration archiving, a dedicated export tool usually saves significant admin time.