Exchange 2013 In-Place Hold - Best way to 'archive' ex-staff Mailboxes

Hi EE,

We've only recently upgraded from Exchange 2007 and have applied In-Place Hold to all mail in all mailboxes, indefinitely.

Traditionally, we have archived mailboxes to PST when staff leave the company. The PST gets stored on a file server and the user account and mailbox are deleted.

This gets a little confusing when In-Place Hold is applied - I can't find any documentation online that outlines if the 'Held' emails will be retrievable if we do a full mailbox export to PST (I've been using New-MailboxExportRequest).

From what I've read the In-Place Hold 'Held' mail will be cleared if I remove the Hold to then allow me to delete the mailbox.

Any suggestions on how to confirm the behavior and work around this? I've been thinking I might have to do two exports, one using the In-Place Hold PST Export feature and 1 Full Mailbox export for each user.

Thanks in advance,

Adam