Mass PST Importing using AZCopy

Ooooofff!! Been a while, man! Long time no write 😱🤷‍♂️

So, a little bit of back story — sometimes I need to import a tonne of PSTs to people O365 account for my job. I used to do this in a VERY manual way of adding their account to my Outlook and running the import. Or just giving them the PST with a guide to importing. Something needed to change!

I found a better way, I could use AZCopy to upload the files to an Azure Storage Blob and then import automatically using the built-in O365 admin tools.

First step!

Login to https://compliance.microsoft.com and head into the Information Governance -> Import section. Create a new ‘Import’ and name is as you like, not special characters though!

Select the option to upload your data, and copy the SAS URL link. The download the Azure AzCopy program. This is what we use to upload the PST files.

Second Step!

Open a command prompt or PowerShell in the same location as the AzCopy program and run the below command:

azcopy.exe copy “path to PST files” “SAS URL” -recursive

I used the recursive option as, without it, my operation wasn’t seeing the PSTs.

Leave this to run, it can take a while depending on your data. There are other parameters to this but I didn’t use them.

Third Step!

Create a PST Import mapping file — this is the step that confused me but hopefully, I can shed some light on it! Download a copy of it from here

I left the TargetRootFolder, ContentCodePage, SPFileContainer, SPManifestContainer and SPSiteURL empty. Since my data was in the following path ‘E:\Company\over_20gb’ I needed to set the FilePath to ‘over_20gb’ for all entries.

This is an example of my file:

Workload FilePath Name Mailbox IsArchive

Exchange over_20gb first.last@company.com.pst first.last@company.com FALSE

Fourth Step!

Repeat step one until the upload, tick box buttons for I’m done uploading my files AND I have access to the mapping file. Use the Select mapping file and upload your file. Following that, you can Validate.

If all is well after the validation, you can either choose to filter your data or not and start the import.

The progress of this import is visible on the Importing page. Be prepared to wait as it can take a looooong time!

Enjoy! 😎