How to Migrate Archive Mailbox to Office 365; A Comprehensive Guide
IT admins often face situations where they have to migrate archive mailbox to Office 365. When we say archive mailboxes, it can mean either Exchange Archives (In-Place Archive) or Online Archive mailboxes. Let’s picture it separately.
Scenario 1: Organizations with on-premise Exchange servers often keep massive data in their Exchange archive mailbox due to compliance, legal hold, and just to free up the primary mailboxes. While for the short term, it could benefit them, the main challenge emerges when they switch to Office 365. Migrating primary mailboxes can be done via various methods, but when it comes to migrating large archive mailbox to Office 365, they often find it a challenging yet error-prone task.
Scenario 2: Organizations already on Microsoft 365, often use online archive as a scalable storage solution for growing email data. However situations like consolidating tenant accounts, addressing storage restructuring, or implementing advanced compliance features in Office 365, they also need to migrate online archive mailboxes to Office 365 primary mailboxes. Although, you might find these migrations simpler than the on-premise data transfer. However, they come with their own complexities.
Hence in this detailed write-up, we are going to explore both scenarios and provide the most efficient yet reliable solution to perform these migrations with flying colors.
Table of Contents
But before we begin, let’s see firsthand the situations in detail under which administrators have to carry out de-archiving. As it will help you get an idea of which path to follow for the process.
Why Migrate Archive Mailboxes to Microsoft 365?
There are quite a few reasons to carry out this reverse transportation. See if your situation matches anyone we outline here.
- Cost is a primary factor to consider in dearchiving. Neither the cloud-based nor the on-premise set is free. Online archiving costs an additional $ 3.00 on a per-user basis. This might not sound like a lot, but any extra cost is a loss in revenue. Moreover, organizations on a tight budget may want to disable this feature, especially if it is not used regularly. The on-premise archiving may be more costly.
- Another reason might be that when a user leaves the organization. Other individuals may still need access to the mailbox archives. So the admin needs to transform the regular account into a shared one. However, this can’t be done in an archived mailbox. So first, administrators need to change the archive status and migrate archive mailbox to Office 365.
- Compliance, legal, and regulatory audits may require your organization to keep an archive. This can also be the case for an in-house investigation. So after the process is done or there is a new change in policy, users need to ping the admin to ask for archival access. It is better to restore the archive mailboxes to their respective owners.
Going through these situations helps us identify one key point. That archive retrieval is either from an Exchange on-premise setup or Exchange Online. However, for the regular user, this does not matter, as they don’t interact with the archive.
Admins have to take special care before rushing into the process of transporting archives out of their mailboxes; otherwise, they might have to deal with unforeseen problems. To assist you, we have a list of checks to be made beforehand.
Want to Transfer Archive Mailbox to Office 365? Do This First
As more and more organizations adopt instant messaging alternatives, having rarely used archives is not a good idea. So this can be another reason to get rid of the latest archive and gradually phase out the rest of it. However, there are a subset of tasks we need to do.
- Disable the current archiving rule. Otherwise, you may end up in a circular trap of searching the same mailbox again and again.
- Make sure the users have Office 365 licenses and a live mailbox.
- Check the users who have enough free volume to accommodate the archive data in their regular mailbox. If you try to put you may end up with overflow errors. So tell users about the de-archiving and make them clear out all unnecessary mail from their regular mailbox.
- Don’t delete the archives as unlike regular mail they have no direct retrieval mechanism. In other words, archive removal is permanent.
This completes the preparations now it’s time for the situation-wise solution.
Scenario 1: Transfer Exchange (In-Place) Archive Mailbox to Office 365
The on-premise archive works similarly to the online archive, at least from the user’s point of view. However, admins know that behind the scenes it has near-infinite capacity, unlike its 1.5 TB cap limit online counterpart.
But this limitless archiving capacity comes at a cost. Microsoft does not provide any in-house solution for you to de-archive those emails. So to place them directly in the live mailboxes of the Office 365 cloud environment, you need to take a different route.
Manual Method to Transfer In-Place Archive Mailbox to Microsoft 365
It is like the one we took earlier from the online archive. However, data volume in an on-premise system is usually greater. So the problems in using eDiscovery also increase. Not to mention that you have to sort out all the PST data. There is more than one way to do that including:
- Cutover Migration
- Staged Migration
- Drive Shipping
- Network Upload
Each has its drawbacks, like Cutover being only for 200 mailboxes, and Staged deprecated on the later versions of Exchange. Drive shipping may be allowed at your location or take too much time. The infrastructure required to perform network uploads may not be available.
Don’t worry, you can bypass all these drawbacks by using an automated utility. Let us see how.
Automated Alternative to Migrate Exchange Archive Mailbox to Microsoft 365
Stage 1. Export In-Place Archive Mailbox EDB Files Dismounting and Copying EDB Files
To migrate the Exchange archive mailbox to Microsoft 365, you have to export the EDB files. Follow the below steps for the same.
Warning: This method involves server downtime and should only be performed during maintenance windows.
Step 1. Run the following command in the Exchange Management Shell to Dismount the Database.
Dismount-Database -Identity <DatabaseName>
Step 2. Navigate to the Exchange database directory and copy the required EDB file.
Step 3. Once the copy is complete, use the below command to Mount the Database:
Mount-Database -Identity <DatabaseName>
Stage 2. Migrate Exchange Archive Mailbox Data to Microsoft 365 Via Software
Instead of dealing with complex and lengthy manual solutions, it is always a great idea to utilize industry-rated software. It has several modern features, just slightly tuned to cater to the needs of the Exchange Server. Here are the series of steps that you need to perform via the SysTools Exchange Recovery tool.
- Step 1. Download, install, and launch the software on your computer.
- Step 2. Select the EDB file path and add the Exchange Database file.
- Step 3. Run advance scan mode and preview Exchange mailboxes.
- Step 4. Select the export option as Office 365. You need to configure “Office 365” settings. Click on Advanced Settings.
- Step 5. You can choose the enter destination mailbox option for migrating the EDB file to Office 365.
Scenario 2: Migrate Online Archive Mailbox to Office 365
This is the kind of situation where the Archive data is already on the cloud but not directly accessible to the users. Here, admins currently lack a way to bring these data to the primary mailbox.
Manual Method to Transfer Online Archive Mailbox to Office 365
The lack of a direct manual method is quite problematic. But here we have come up with a solution that just might work. Here, we are going to take advantage of eDiscovery. With which we can get the PST file of all mailboxes, including the ones that are in the archive.
Some developers have made custom PoweShell scripts of their own however they are quite complicated and condense the entire archive into a single mailbox. So use the eDiscovery.
Get the PST
Send them to users and ask them to add them via Outlook client 2019 or older. The new Outlook removes the PST import function altogether.
Automated Alternative Ways to Move Online Archive Mailbox to Microsoft 365
Instead of dealing with eDiscovery crashes, not working, or shuffling through PowerShell scripts, we recommend that admins check out the SysTool Office 365 to Office 365 migration utility. It simplifies the de-archiving with the help of its intuitive UI. Apart from the graphical advantage, the tool has several built-in filters and also the ability to change the destination accounts. Meaning that an archival address is not available on the cloud. You can still pull the data and place it in an account that is live with no extra effort.
The following steps are to be followed in the case of this automated utility.
Step 1. Launch the utility and choose your endpoints, with the source being the MS 365 Archive and the destination being the MS 365 Archive option.
Step 2. Archive mailbox only has one workload option and that is emails select it put a date filter if required, and move ahead.
Step 3. In the Source tab, you have to fill in the admin credentials and Validate them. A similar operation is to be performed on the target tab.
Step 4. Go to the user mapping section and complete the user map using any of the available options, Fetch, Import, or Download.
Step 5. Then, in the preview page, you can see all available users, pick the ones whose email archive you want to migrate, set priority, validate, and migrate.
Conclusion
In this article, we gave users a foolproof plan to migrate archive mailbox to Office 365 setup. With this, all the previously unavailable emails appear again in the user mailboxes. These can then be used like any other regular mail. The tools we discuss here are available for both archive types whether the cloud or on-premise. Moreover, none of the automated solutions tamper with the existing mailbox data. They simply adjust the archive into the freely available space of the user mailbox.