Microsoft Purview e discovery Export

Question

While exporting data from Purview, the locations.csv depicts multiple number of failed items. Does the Items.csv report has those items which have failed or is there any way to understand what items have failed while exporting the whole set?

Answer 1

Hello Vaishnavi Gupta, as discussed over Private messages after seeing your excel snapshot.

It was concluded that Microsoft Purview does not generate a list of failed individual items in exports, if a location fails, no items from it are exported or logged in items.csv, and no separate “failed items” report exists.

The eDiscovery export process operates in two phases:

1. Discovery & Collection: Identifies and gathers items from locations (mailboxes, sites, etc.).
2. Export: Attempts to download items to your local machine or Azure Blob.

• If a location fails during export (e.g., due to permissions, throttling, or corruption), the entire location is skipped — no partial export occurs.
• Since no items are processed from a failed location, there are no item-level records to log — not in items.csv, not in any other file.
• The ErrorWarning in locations.csv is the maximum detail available — it tells you why the location failed, but not which items inside it were impacted, because none were even attempted.

What You Can Do:

1. Fix the Location-Level Error

Use the ErrorWarning message to resolve the root cause:

• “Access Denied” → Add user to eDiscovery Manager role.
• “Mailbox Not Found” → Check if user was deleted or mailbox disabled.
• “Throttled” → Reduce concurrent exports or retry later.

Re-run the Export

After fixing the issue, re-export the same search scope. If the location now succeeds, all its items will appear in items.csv.

There is no built-in way to get a list of failed items - only failed locations. The solution is to fix the location-level error and re-export. If you need item-level failure tracking, consider submitting feedback via the Microsoft 365 Admin Center or https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/ to request this feature.

You can also do the following Before exporting,

Run a Content Search in the same eDiscovery case and preview results for the problematic location. This lets you confirm items exist and are accessible before export.

Run a content search in Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Check Audit Logs for Activity Details While not item-specific, audit logs may show failed export attempts or access denials tied to the location.

Useful link:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/ediscovery-export-search-results?spm=a2ty_o01.29997173.0.0.4138c921r5uF88

Please "Accept as Answer" if the answer provided is useful, so that you can help others in the community looking for remediation for similar issues.

Thanks

Pratyush