How to Migrate Archive Mailbox to Office 365 and Regain Data Access
Microsoft Office 365 admins often face situations where they have to migrate archive mailbox to Office 365. Companies have been facing such situations ever since the early days of Microsoft’s cloud rollout. Although keeping data in this digital cold storage has its plus points. Your organization may think otherwise.
However, the real challenge is how to transfer these archived mailboxes back to a live state. Not to worry, by using this article as a medium, we are going to teach you how to do exactly that. Along with the knowledge, we also provide you with tools to complete the process accurately and on time. It doesn’t matter if your archive is local or on the cloud; we have all bases covered.
But before we begin, let’s see firsthand the situations 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.
Table of Contents
Why Migrate Archive Mailbox to Office 365 At All?
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 a user left 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 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. We begin with the most requested one which is archiving when the archive is already on the cloud.
Scenario 1 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
Manual Method
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 Office 365 archive and the destination being the Office 365 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.
Scenario 2 Transfer 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
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 n-Place Archive Mailbox to Office 365
A sister tool of the one described earlier is used in such scenarios. It has almost the same feature set, 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 Exchange to Office 365 migration tool.
- Open the tool on your machine and perform endpoint selection. Pick Exchange as the source and Office 365 as the destination.
- Then select Emails as the Workload and apply a date filter to set a custom timeline restriction.
- Go to the source page, add the admin-level credentials, validate them, and press Next.
- Do the same on the destination screen as well.
- On the mapping screen, select an appropriate method out of Fetch, Import, and Download, and add the users.
- Go to the preview screen and check the user list, select the ones you want to migrate, and prioritize your selection. Then Validate and click Start Migration.
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.