When using the Exchange Mailbox Add-on to perform brick-level backups of users’ mailboxes, one of the options involves utilizing the Microsoft Mailbox Merge Wizard, ExMerge. There are two limitations of ExMerge that user’s should be aware of, as outlined below.
No backup of public folders
ExMerge does not provide a facility to backup public folder in your Exchange Server, and will only extract mail data from private mailboxes. To backup your public folders in Exchange, you can perform an Information Store backup, which allows you to restore your entire Exchange Server, including your public folders.
This facility is included in the base license of BackupAssist and is accessible from the Exchange tab in the software.
Read more about Exchange Information Store backups
2GB file size limit for PST files
ExMerge will extract mailbox data to a PST file which can then be read by Outlook or merged back into your Exchange Server. Unfortunately, ExMerge creates PST files in Outlook 2002 and earlier formats.
In Outlook 2002 and earlier, PST files are in the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) format which has a file size limit of 2 gigabytes (GB). Once a PST file grows beyond 2GB in size, the file will become corrupt and unreadable by both Outlook and ExMerge.
Microsoft article Q288283 for errors that occur when PST files exceed 2GB.
Microsoft article Q830336 for more details about the 2GB PST limit
To overcome this ExMerge limitation, we recommend that you choose to group your mail data by month by selecting a grouping method in the Exchange tab of the software. This option will act to store mail data within separate folders for each month and overcomes the file size limit imposed on PST files (2GB) as each separate PST file will be much smaller as it only contains mail data for a specific month.
Read more about the grouping of mail
If your PST file does grow beyond 2GB unexpectedly, you are able to retrieve some of the data by using the Microsoft Inbox Repair Tool that is available for download. This utility allows you to create a truncated copy of your PST file. The resultant copy of the file, however, will not have all of the original data because the utility will shrink the file to a size that Outlook can read (ie. less than 2GB).
Download the Microsoft Inbox Repair Utility
