When exporting very large mailboxes to PST, you can face performance issues on the Exchange Server and risk of corruption in PST file. Also, it is difficult to handle and manage large PST files. If you split the data during export, it will make the export more manageable and prevent data integrity issues. In this post, we will be discussing how to split large EDB file during export to avoid mailbox size limit issues.
Why you Need to Split an EDB File?
There are multiple reasons why you would need to split EDB file. Let’s explore some of the common ones.
- Load balancing of the operations on the Exchange Server. If you have one mailbox database with hundreds of mailboxes and something happens to the database, then all the mailboxes get affected. The Standard version of Exchange Server allows creation of up to five databases while the Enterprise version allows to create unlimited number of databases.
- Improving performance of the Exchange Server. Smaller files increase the performance of the server when accessing and fetching the data and also improve the user’s experience.
- Ensuring compliance with regulations and company policies. Many organizations add size limits and quotas on mailboxes for storage efficiency, and also for compliance and regulations.
Methods to Split Large EDB File during Export
You can export EDB file data to PST using Microsoft Outlook, Exchange Server native tools, and a specialized EDB to PST converter tool. Let’s explore these methods in detail.
1. Using Microsoft Outlook
You can use Microsoft Outlook if you have very small mailboxes. If you have very large mailboxes, the application will not be able to handle the export and the exported file. Follow these steps to export mailboxes to PST using Outlook:
Note: Make sure that the profile for the account is set.
- Open Outlook. Click on File.
- Click on Open & Export.
- Click on Import/Export.
- Select Export to a file.
- Select Outlook Data file (.pst).
- Select what you want to export and click on Filter.
- Select the location to export to.
This will export the selected data to a PST file.
Note: When using Outlook, you will get very limited export capabilities and no automation. Though you will be able to export the mailboxes to PST, you will need to manually import it back into another database.
2. Using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS)
You can use the PowerShell commands in the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) to export mailboxes to PST. With PowerShell commands, you will have a little bit more flexibility when exporting mailboxes to PST file. For this, you need to use the New-MailboxExportRequest PowerShell command.
Before using the command, you need to fulfil the below prerequisites:
- Create a shared folder on the server or another server with the Exchange Server Subsystem, having full rights to the folder and share.
- Assign the Import/Export roles to the user exporting the mailboxes.
After this has been done, you can use the below command to export all the items from a mailbox, which are dated before 01/01/2024, to PST.
New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox user-A -FilePath \\EXC-SRV\Exports\2025.pst -ContentFilter {(Received -lt '01/01/2024')}
In the above command, the lt option means less than.
To check the progress of export, you can use the Get-MailboxExportRequest command.
You can use the below command to export the mailbox items based on a date range.
New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox user-a -FilePath \\EXC-SRV\Exports\range.pst -ContentFilter {(Received -gt '01/01/2024') -and (Received -lt '12/31/2024')}
The command above uses the gt (greater than) and lt (less than) parameters to create a date range.
Limitations of the Above Methods
There are a few challenges when using the native tools to split data during the export, such as:
- When using Microsoft Outlook, there are limited options for filtering. Also, the application may crash when exporting large mailboxes.
- With PowerShell commands, you can automate the process and export a number of mailboxes but this is limited to user mailboxes, archives, and shared mailboxes. Running a number of export requests at a time can hinder the performance of the server.
- The above methods can only work if the database is mounted and the Exchange Server is running.
3. Using an EDB to PST Converter Tool
To overcome the limitations of native tools, you can use Stellar Converter for EDB – a specialized EDB to PST converter tool. With this tool, you can easily open multiple EDB files of any size and from any version of Exchange Server. After a quick scan of the database, you will be shown the entire structure of the database. You can export user mailboxes, user archives, shared mailboxes, disabled mailboxes, and public folder to PST and other file formats with multiple filter options. You can also export the mailboxes directly to a live Exchange Server database or Microsoft 365 tenant with automatic mailbox matching, parallel exports, and priority exports.
Conclusion
Above, we have seen the importance of splitting the data in your Exchange Server database. Splitting the data helps protect the integrity of database and performance of the server. We have discussed different methods to export the EDB data to PST. However, there are a number of challenges you can face when using the native tools. Alternatively, you can use Stellar Converter for EDB to overcome such challenges and export the mailboxes to PST with ease while maintaining complete data integrity.
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