Moving Exchange Public Folders from one server to another used to entail a fairly time-consuming process of opening the property sheet for EACH public folder, setting its replication properties, waiting for replication, and then removing the source replica. This was mitigated somewhat by the ability to propagate settings to subfolders. If you were really savvy, you moved all subfolders underneath one top-level folder, made the adjustment, and then moved them back. Even so, it was a labor-intensive, time-consuming process.

So we all cheered mightily when Exchange 2003 SP2 brought us the capability to right-click the Public Folder Store and Move All Replicas. However, this euphoria was short-lived for me. I found that this process often did not move all of the data.

Well, I was missing one important piece of information: Do not dismount the database! If the source database is dismounted before all its contents are moved, you have to tell it to move the replicas again. A dismount of the database creates the system folders again and blocks removal of Public Folder instances in the database.

I suspect that in my impatience to get on with the migration, I most likely made some other changes that required a reboot (which dismounts the database), and my public folder migration was interrupted. I just assumed that, like any other Exchange replication process, it would pick up where it left off when the store came back up.

That being said, I still highly recommend that you take a good backup of the Public Folders to PST before you use this method, just in case. Getting at the Public Folders to restore/verify data after an Exchange migration can be very time consuming if you didn’t export them to PST. It’s time well spent.

One additional tidbit: Make sure you set the public folder replication interval in the Public Folder Store properties. By default, the replication values are empty in the UI. I’m not sure if they are really not set in the software, but I always go in there and click the “defaults” button, or set the values I want.

Tags: Exchange, Migration, Public Folder Replication, Replicas