Backing up an Exchange User Mail Box

As any company grows, employee’s come and go. In the past I was always nervous about deleting a user, and removing their mail box, just in case there was some messages that needed to be retrieved. I usually gave that users department head access to the users mail account and disabled the user, but even that was not that great of an experience. The department head still had to know what folder to open, and it was really hard to navigate.

While looking into some different backup solutions, I came across ExMerge, a tool from Microsoft. This tool was designed to help you move user mail boxes from one Exchange Server to another. This program will extract a complete user mail box, and store it in a PST so that it can be imported on to another server.

For my purposes when an employee leaves, I can now archive their mailbox to a PST, burn a copy to a DVD for backup, and give the department head a copy of the PST they can store and use locally on their own PC.