As the migration form Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 continues, one of the areas that is a MUST is the ability to backup mailboxes. In this Exchange 2007 How To, I will show you how you can export malboxes from your Exchange 2007 Database to individual PST Files.

In order to export or import mailboxes to PST files you will need to make sure that the following this are in order.

• Export/Import to PST must be run from a 32 bit client machine with Exchange Management Tools installed (Version Exchange 2007 SP1 or later). The 32bit requirement comes from a dependency with the Outlook client.
• Either Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 must be installed on the client machine.
• The user running the task must be an Exchange Organization Admin or an Exchange Server Admin on the server where the mailbox to export/import lives.

Open up the Exchange Management Shell, then what we are going to do is pipe the results from the GET-MAILBOX command to EXPORT-MAILBOX, Like so.

get-mailbox -database “SERVER_NAME\DATABSE_NAME” | export-mailbox -PSTFolderPath C:\PSTFiles

What I think is great about this is that you can select different mail databases. For example we have 2 seperate databases, one for staff and one for students. Therefore we can split this process up and run it on different days.

Next up is to create a scheduled task to run the Powershell Command. Subscribe to my RSS Feed to keep up to date with more Windows Server Tips, Tricks and Tutorials.