How to Backup All Office 365 Emails to PST? Step By Step Guide to Follow

Summary: Just to make sure that their emails are saved, most of the users want to take their emails backup. So, in this post, we have explained the manual and a reliable solution to take back up Office 365 emails.     

Office 365 is a famous cloud-based office suite, which provides various Microsoft productivity applications like OneDrive, SharePoint, Excel, etc.

But, like other cloud platforms, Office 365 is also vulnerable to service disruptions, human errors, outages, server connectivity. Due to these cases, users are not able to access their emails. Which becomes an issue while trying to access email data on an urgent basis. That is why it is recommended to take back up of emails. There are other reasons why users want to back up their email data.

Reasons For Taking Backup of Emails

1. To have full control over email files.

2. For easy data accessibility.

3. Server unavailability.

In several cases, the user tries to delete some unwanted data and with that, they accidentally delete data that are required. So, to avoid all these kinds of issues in the future, users look for a solution to take email backups. 

To make this process easier for the user, we have discussed the solution in this article which will guide them to back up their Office 365 emails.

Initially, we will be explaining the manual method to take email backup. As users generally look for a free solution, but still users can implement this method as a temporary basis to export emails to the desktop.

Manual Approach for Email Backup

1.     User can use an e-Discovery solution to take Office 365 mailbox backup. Which had 3 Stages.

• Choose e-Discovery Administrator

• Perform A new content search

• Export the search result to PST

Step 1.

•  Using your credentials, log in to your Office 365, then open Admin Centre and select the Security option.
•  Now, navigate to the Permission option and select e-Discovery manager.
•  Select the E-Discovery administrator and press the save button.

Step 2

•  Navigate to the Search option and click the content search option.
•  Press the New content option when the content search window will display.
•  For new search mention the name and description and press the Next button.
•  Then choose the location where you want to save the backup in the PST file.
•  If needed, select the keywords and apply conditions. And click the Next button.
• After viewing your search settings, press submits button.

Step 3

• Select your search and press the Action option.
• Click the Export result option and select your output option. Then press the Export option.
• Navigate to the Export tab, choose your last exported and press the Download results button. Scroll down and copy the export key.
• Click once the application, named e-Discovery export tool will open. Now paste the copied exported key and set the location to save PST file.
• Finally, press the start button, and Office 365 backup process will be initiated by the tool. 

Limitations

• Time consuming process.
• Don’t give any guarantee on complete backup.
• Without an Internet connection user cannot initiate the backup process.

Note – User must understand that this manual process has a certain limitation which makes the process inefficient. In this situation, it is suitable to look for an automated solution.   

Professional Solution for Office 365 Email Backup 

User can go for the manual method only if the user has fewer email files to export which are not crucial. As they have limitations, and many complexities involve while using them. Like having data loss issues, data corruption, or failure to take backup.

But if the user has sensitive email files and wants to take the backup. Then they should consider the automated solution Office 365 Backup and restore tool to take the backup of Office 365 emails effortlessly.        

We have mentioned the simple steps to take back-up of Office 365 emails.

• Download and run the software on your machine and activate it. Choose office 365 as your Source platform and Outlook as your destination platform.
• Select and mark the checkboxes of the options in categories and apply date filters that need to be exported.
• Enter the credentials and hit Validate to assign permissions, then press Next.
• In the destination window, enter the destination path and size of the files to be allocated in Outlook. when a user exports an email from Office 365, it doesn’t allow the user to validate the permissions.
• Add the user mailboxes by selecting on of the given options i.e. Fetch Users and Import Users.
• Here, set the priority for the mailboxes that are required to export than others and press the Start Backup button.
• During the initial process if a user receives new emails then, the user can choose the Delta Backup option to export only those emails.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed how to take backup of Office 365 emails. For user convenience, we have mentioned both manual and professional methods to perform the backup operation. But it is advised to use the automated backup solution.