How to Export Exchange Contacts to PST Using PowerShell Commands?
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Exchange Server contacts are crucial to an organization as its other items contain addresses with which regular information exchange is established via emails. Do you know even these Exchange contacts need to be backed up? Let us throw light on it this requirement of Exchange users.
The Exchange administrator may seek to export Exchange Server mailbox contacts in these scenarios.
The above reasons, one or more, can compel Exchange administrators to have a backup of Exchange mailbox contacts, and the best way to do this is by exporting them into portable and accessible Outlook PST files.
To export Exchange contacts to PST file format, Exchange administrators can take the help of the Exchange PowerShell or the Exchange Management Shell cmdlet – New-MailboxExportRequest. This method applies to Exchange Server 2010 and the above versions.
Let us start with the pre-requirements for the export of Exchange contacts to PST files.
In the above command, provide the respective Exchange mailbox user name in place of <username>.
Once all the above conditions are fulfilled, follow these steps to exports contacts from your Exchange Server mailbox to the Outlook PST file on the shared folder path.
Provide the PST file path and the mailbox user name in the above command as per the requirements.
There is another way to export contacts from Exchange shared mailboxes and regular user mailboxes to CSV file format, i.e., using the Microsoft Outlook Import/Export feature.
Note: Exchange administrators may face an un-identification error after running the above command. For this, learn to fix the “New-MailboxExportRequest couldn’t find the enterprise organization container” error.
It can take time to export with the status Queued, which means the export is in progress, and you need to wait for the process to be completed. Once the export is completed, you can find the exported contacts at the specified location.
The native method of running an Exchange PowerShell command to export mailbox contacts to Outlook PST file for backup and other uses definitely requires hands-on experience on the Exchange Management Shell application and running its commands as a minor fault could result in complex errors and sometimes, in data loss or database corruption. One more drawback of the native export solution is slow performance. It can take some time to export contacts from the Exchange Server organization to the Outlook PST file format.
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New-MailboxExportRequest command in the Exchange PowerShell offers export of Exchange user mailbox or items like Contacts, Calendars, etc. However, its limitations like slow export, errors, or manual mistakes, force users to look for a professional tool like Kernel for Exchange Server.
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