A somewhat common question that we get from our Clients is, “How can we backup our Exchange Online mailbox data”? In this post we’ll show you one way using the Microsoft Online Migration Tools.

The first thing we’ll demonstrate is how to export the mailbox data from an Exchange Online mailbox to a local file. Let’s say we want to export the [email protected] mailbox to a local file. To do this you’ll need to go to the migration command shell and run:

Get-XsHostedExchangeMailboxdata -sourceserver “red001.mail.microsoftonline.com”-sourcelocation “https://red001.mail.microsoftonline.com/exchange” -sourceidentity[email protected] | export-transporterbinary -targetfilepath c:\export -targetfileprefix “exonlinetest”

After typing the above command it will ask you for your Microsoft Online admin credentials and proceed to export the mailbox to a .tbin file. So we now have the mail data locally, unfortunately it’s in a .tbin file that you can’t do much with. All you can do with it is reimport it into a Microsoft Exchange Online Mailbox. In this restore example, let’s assume we have a backup from two months ago, and the user wants to recover a single message that they can’t find. We’ll restore the backup file to a mailbox called [email protected] and then give the user access to the mail so they can try and track down their missing message. To do the restore we would need to run the following command, specifying the path to the backup file and the identity of the mailbox we want to restore the file to:

Import-TransporterBinary -Sourcefilename “C:\export\exonlinetest 2010-02-23T10_08_17.tbin” | Add-XsExchangeOnlineItem -identity [email protected]

After typing the above command it will ask you for your Microsoft Online admin credentials and proceed to import the .tbin file into the restore mailbox. You could then grant the user rights to that mailbox and they could try and find their missing message.

This is a very basic example of a backup and restore using the Migration Tools. It would be easy to create a script which backs up all mailboxes on a routine basis. If you’d like assistance creating such a script, or have questions or comments about this post, please contact us and we’d be happy to assist.

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