Overcome Exchange BadItemLimit While Moving Mailboxes Between Servers

Microsoft has come up with updated versions of Exchange Server regularly with the passage of time. And this has been a constant practice adopted by them to make their product remain updated with the latest technologies and requirement. Latest of its releases is the 2013 version meanwhile, a very less amount of users have started using it yet.

However, Exchange 2010 is presently the highly used version of this messaging Server platform and upgrading to it is made simpler with the usage of EMS (Exchange Management Shell).

We are not basically going to discuss about the steps involved in migrating mailboxes from one Exchange Server to another; that you find anywhere on Google. But a critical concern is confronted in this process i.e. a baditemlimit.

BadItemLimit – Know It Better

This is something that makes the simplest procedure of moving mailboxes into Exchange 2010 a task for you. A baditemlimit is an issue basically confronted when moving mailboxes that consists of large number of depraved (damaged) items in it. It is believed that the older the mailbox is or larger the number of items it consists of there are more chances that certain items are corrupt in it. Corruption tends to takes place in similar circumstances. Let us discuss it in more detail.

Overcoming BadItemLimit

Some may suppose that Local Move Request Wizard is to be used in the process of removing BadItemLimit problem but that isn’t possible. As you will have to decide for a maximum limit of messages that are corrupt in your mailbox. So, the wizard is simply not helpful for you in this case.

Go for Exchange Management Shell instead. This might seem to be backward step to users more advanced on Exchange front. But believe it or not this is a very powerful Exchange based PowerShell program where you can execute advanced level of Exchange management based commands. All the procedures you carry out on an EMS

The command to use for moving your mailbox: New-MoveRequest -Identity ‘Administrator’ -BadItemLimit 100 -AcceptLargeDataLoss. (Replace administrator in this command with the alias for the respective mailbox that has to be moved.)

1. Set BadItemLimit to a proper amount.
2. Press Enter and execute the command.
3. In case of successful execution a message will flash confirming the queue for mailbox move request.

Tips

1. Once the queued mailboxes are moved successfully you will know it as their type will change into User Mailbox from Legacy under list of mailbox.
2. In case of move operation failure you can always use Remove Move Request option to unload the burden as; mailbox consisting of too many corrupt items might be causing this.
3. Properties section will prove to be helpful in taking a log at log data to check what resulted in the failure of previous mailbox move.
4. “Get-MoveRequest | ?{$_.status -eq “In Progress”} | Get-MoveRequestStatistics | ft Disp*,Per*,BytesTransferredPerMinute” use this command to check statistics of move progress to know what amount of time will be taken to completely move the queued mailboxes.

Conclusion: If at any point you feel that the procedure is taking too long or is complicated enough to be executed on a repeated manner then; opt for a commercial utility like Exchange Recovery tool that can repair your corrupt mailbox items and move them to desired mailbox alias without demanding effort and time input from end user.