Summary: You may encounter the TooManyTransientFailureRetriesPermanentException error, while migrating mailboxes from on-premises Exchange Server to Office 365 in a hybrid setup. In this post, you’ll learn about this error in detail and the ways to fix it. You’ll also find about an EDB converter tool that can help in easily migrating mailboxes from Exchange Server to Office 365.
Exchange Server offers various types of setups to migrate to Office 365. One of the options is hybrid migration. As the name suggests, in hybrid system your Office 365 tenant and local on-premises Exchange Server can act as one. You can shift and lift your mailboxes from the local server to the cloud, with no interruption to the user. When all the mailboxes are transferred, you can easily do a cut-off. This is the smoothest way to migrate to Office 365 but also the longest one.
Selecting the hybrid system depends on the complexity or the size of your Exchange Server or mailboxes. With the hybrid system, you may encounter several issues, caused by various elements. These elements include bad configuration on your local server, hybrid configuration is missing something, fault on the network, or the internet performance.
While migrating mailboxes from a local Exchange 2010 Server to Exchange Online in Office 365 with a hybrid system, you might get the error – TooManyTransientFailureRetriesPermanentException.
Why does the Message “Too Many Transient Failure Retries Permanent Exception” Appear in Migration Batch?
This error usually occurs due to an issue with the mailbox which is being transferred at the time. It will not affect all mailboxes but a particular mailbox or mailboxes in your databases. So, the migration overuses its efforts to try to migrate the mailbox.
How to Fix the “Too Many Transient Failure Retries Permanent Exception” Error?
There are various things that could affect this off-boarding of the set mailbox. So, if other mailboxes have been migrated with no issues, this means there is an issue with a specific mailbox. It is always recommended not to go full blast and try to run the off-boarding of the mailboxes all at once as this will give you an indication of the issues that you might have.
You can start by resetting the search folders from Outlook application. If the search folders are corrupted, it could be an issue on the matter of migration. These can be cleared easily by opening Outlook with the account of the impacted user profile setup.
You need to open Outlook with a specific parameter.
- Right-click on the Start button.
- Click on Run.
- Type outlook.exe /cleanfinders.
- Press Enter.
After Outlook is loaded and all folders have been updated, close Outlook.
- Right-click on the Start button.
- Click on Run.
- Type outlook.exe /cleanviews.
- Press Enter.
Once Outlook is loaded and all folders have been updated, close Outlook. Then, try again to run the mailbox move. If the problem persists, you need to get the exact error where the move is failing. While connected to Exchange Online and logged into your tenant with the global admin, you can use PowerShell to get more information that could give an indication or perhaps the exact culprit behind the issue.
You can run the following command. This will give you a small report of the last two failures on the specified mailbox and more information on the matter.
$stats = Get-MoveRequestStatistics -identity [user@contoso.com](mailto:user@contoso.com) -IncludeReport$stats.Report.Failures | select -last 2After running this command, you can analyze the problem. If the problem persists, you can export the report for analysis to an XML file, which can be provided to Microsoft for support.
Get-MoveRequestStatistics -identity [user@contoso.com](mailto:user@contoso.com) -IncludeReport -DiagnosticInfo showtimeslots | Export-CliXml <XML File Name and Path>Although a Microsoft engineer can assist you on the matter, it could take some time as the problem could be with the mailbox which is stopping you from migrating your data. Here you need to consider that there might be an issue with your Exchange Server or network performance or configuration. So, you would need an ideal solution to offload your data without the complication of a hybrid setup. You also need to consider the fact that if you use public folders, it would be a bit complicated to migrate them from local to online.
It is suggested also to use the Test-MigrationServerAvailability which will test the availability of the target server before migrating from a local Exchange Server using an IMAP endpoint. The syntax of this command is as follows.
Test-MigrationServerAvailability -Imap -RemoteServer <Your IMAP server> -Port 993Test-MigrationServerAvailability -Imap -RemoteServer <Your IMAP server> -Port 143This will get your connectivity between the source and target via the IMAP ports 143, and the secure IMAP 993.
Another solution would be to use MFCMAPI to check and resolve problems found in folders. The MFCMAPI tool needs to be configured by clicking on Tools and Options. One needs to enable the Use the MDB_ONLINE flag when calling OpenMsgStore and click on OK.
The next step is to click on Session and Login in MFCMAPI to open the Outlook mail profile. From there you will need to right click on the results and click on Open Store. Here you will see Top of Information Store with all the structure. Once you find the problematic folder, one can simply delete the mentioned filed. For it to take effect, one must tick the Hard Deletion option. After the problematic folder/s have been removed, one can close the MFCMAPI, remove the Outlook Profile and then resume the migration batch and the migration should continue with no issues.
To Conclude
Alternatively, you can use an application that can seamlessly open any version of Exchange Server database – from 2003 to the latest version of 2019. Stellar Converter for EDB can offer this and more. You can browse through the whole database structure and open contacts, calendar, tasks and journals. You can granularly export mailboxes from multiple files to PST and other formats. The application can also be used to directly export to another mailbox database. This could come handy when you upgrade from Exchange Server 2010 to Exchange 2019 without having to hop to an Exchange Server 2013 or 2016. You can also use it as a migration tool to migrate from on-premises Exchange to Office 365 as you can directly export mailboxes and public folders to the tenant.
