Scripting: Exchange 2010 — Exporting Mailboxes to Personal Folders Files

Microsoft Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 has the ability to export a mailbox to a Personal Folders file (.PST) natively (unlike Exchange 2007 which requires a 32-bit version of Microsoft Outlook on the same system) using the New-MailboxExportRequest cmdlet.

Setting Up

1. Open the Exchange Management Shell in elevated mode and enter:

   New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "Mailbox Import Export" -User Administrator

   where Administrator is the name of the user doing the export requests.

2. Exit Exchange Management Shell.

3. Create a folder and share it. Give the folder and the share Full Access to the group Exchange Trusted Subsystem.

   Let's say the UNC path for the share is \\Server\Mailboxes.

Running The Task

1. Save the following commands into a text file, with the extension ps1:
   Get-MailboxExportRequest | where {$_.status -eq "Completed"} | Remove-MailboxExportRequest -Confirm:$false

   Get-MailboxExportRequest | where {$_.status -eq "Failed"} | Remove-MailboxExportRequest -Confirm:$false

   $Export = Get-Mailbox

   $Export|%{$_|New-MailboxExportRequest -FilePath "\\Server\Mailboxes\$($_.alias).pst"}

2. Save the following into a text file, with the extension cmd or bat:
   PowerShell.exe -PSConsoleFile "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin\exshell.psc1" -Command ". '<path>\ExportMailboxes.ps1'"

3. Run the cmd/bat script from an elevated command prompt or create a task. In both cases, you must be logged in as the user granted permission to run the exports or schedule the task for that user context.

Check Results

Open the Exchange Management Shell in elevated mode and enter:

Get-MailboxExportRequest | where {$_.status -eq "Failed"}

If any operations failed, create a detailed log:

Get-MailboxExportRequest | where {$_.status -eq "Failed"} | Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics -IncludeReport | Format-List > c:\Failed-Exports.txt

Errors are most likely due to corrupted items in the mailbox. One “remedy” is to let the export run with a tolerance for errors; add the following to the New-MailboxImportRequest command:

-BadItemLimit 5000 -AcceptLargeDataLoss

How It Works

When an export request is completed, it remains in the system for 30 days (by default). So the first lines of the script remove any existing requests which have completed or failed.

The remaining lines create an export request for each mailbox, and specifies the destination as a Personal Folders file called <Mailbox Alias>.pst.

The command in the batch file executes the script with PowerShell with the Exchange cmdlets loaded.

Because this process queues a “request” for a mailbox export, at the time the script finishes, the exports have not yet finished (or started, usually).



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