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I support several organizations which have their users' email hosted on third-party Exchange services (not Office365). The total number of mailboxes is approximately 50.

These Exchange hosts perform regular backups of the users' data, but charge fairly high fees for restorations if, for example, the user deletes their mailbox or other accidental user error. Also, their backups are not as frequent as I would prefer, being several days apart in some cases.

Since I don't have Admin access to these Exchange servers, I can't install or set up local backup software on them. Therefore I need a local way to sync their mailboxes to local file(s).

The obvious way would be to create an Outlook profile for each user on my backup computer, and then log into Outlook for each user daily, allowing them to sync with the local PC, with the Outlook cache age set to "All". This would at least download a local snapshot of their entire Exchange account (email, contacts, calendars, to-do, etc) to the PC into an .OST file, which I could use to restore later if necessary. However, this way would be impractical due to the number of Exchange accounts that I need to back up. Also, it would require manual action on my part.

Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this type of "backup" in an automated fashion? The closest thing I've seen so far is a software called MailStore that can be scheduled to do this. However, it only downloads email messages, and omits all calendar entries, contacts, etc. I need the entire account, not just email.

Maybe Powershell scripts are the answer. Not sure at this point.

Thank you for any pointers!

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    This sounds like a horrible situation. Without having admin level access to the hosted Exchange server(s) this is going to be painful. You may be able to use one of these products by creating individual backup jobs for each mailbox by authenticating to the server as each user for their respective mailbox. codetwo.com/backup-for-exchange/?sts=5453 - nucleustechnologies.com/exchange-server-backup
    – joeqwerty
    Dec 31, 2020 at 3:57
  • @joeqwerty thanks for those suggestions. I already tested CodeTwo and it seems you need additional permissions on the server (impersonation) in order to use it. The Kernel backup may be just what I need - I will test it. Unfortunately there are millions of such users in this "horrible situation" because they choose to use third party hosted Exchange servers, and are thus stuck with the host's backup and restoration policies.
    – Ryan Griggs
    Dec 31, 2020 at 15:27

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As joeqwerty has replied above, it is hard to move if you don't own administrator permission.

It occurs to me is asking every exchange users back up their mailbox manually.

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  • Thanks for your reply. As I mentioned to Joe above, this is actually a common situation considering that very many people use cloud hosted Exchange (like Office 365). These people are completely dependent on their providers for backups. There should be a good solution because I can't be the only one who demands more frequent and reliable backups than the host offers.
    – Ryan Griggs
    Jan 1, 2021 at 9:45

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