Forum Discussion
Importing PSTs to Online Archive
I'm always quite nervous about the idea of users trying to do this sort of thing themselves. Where are the PST files stored please? Are they on each users device or on a network share? If they are on the network in a central location, then you are able to use the Import PST feature from the M365 Security and Compliance Center to upload your PST files to Azure storage, and then map them to the correct user mailboxes or their online archives. The process is detailed here - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/importing-pst-files-to-office-365?view=o365-worldwide
I really favour this method myself. Although I appreciate that if the PST's are scattered across multiple user devices then this is not a practical option for you.
Thanks for the response, appreciated. The PST files are stored on the user's hard drives. We recently moved to Outlook in the cloud, with a substantial mailbox increase, so some user's have manually moved their PST files into their main mailbox anyway. Our plan was to ingest them into the Online Archive for the user, to get the PSTs away from being solely on their hard drive - and therefore a single point of failure - but also to not unnecessarily consume their 99GB mailbox.
Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, we can't really afford to do this over our VPN, so I have been looking at other options to help users as much as possible. We've recently launched OneDrive and the Known Folder Move, so PSTs not syncing to OD is bringing up an error message when booting up Outlook for the first time. It's easy to remediate, but wouldn't have been an issue had we managed to do the migration prior to the launch of OneDrive as originally planned.
For PSTs hosted on a central location, we have already migrated them to their respective user's Online Archive using the method you've proposed to great success.
I suppose what I'm getting it as I want an optional method to promote to the business should they want to do it themselves, but isn't quite as reckless / sluggish as manually dragging a folder into their main mailbox, as they currently might be doing as an alternative.
I see where you are coming from. Unfortunately, I know of no way to do this other than the drag and drop and the Outlook import/export wizard that you have already mentioned.