Archiving E-mail

Who: Who needs to archive?

Employees who generally keep a lot of e-mail.
Employees who love to keep every mail they have received and sent.
You generally know who you are...

What: What is Archiving?

Archiving e-mail is the process of moving old e-mail which you don't want to delete or be deleted off to a file on your local computer.
The process is automatic.
The user sets the settings which work best for him/her.
The archive file (archive.pst) is easily accessible in the future for data retrieval.

Where: Where do my old messages go?

Your old message will be exported out of your mailbox and into a file, 'archive.pst', on your local hard drive. You may change the location of the file to a network server, given you have a shared directory on your local area network.

Why: Why do I need to do this?

Everyone's e-mail in Exchange is stored in one file. The file is now roughly 50 Gigabytes. If you understand what a gigabyte (GB) is, just note that a GB is BIG and 50 GB is well... REALLY BIG. Backing up, Restoring, and looking up a piece of information in this file becomes increasingly longer with the increase in size. We understand that with time the file will continue to grow; my goal is to have the file house current information. Information that you would access on a daily basis. With Archiving, you still will have access to your old mail; the mail will just exist in a different file.

How: How do I implement archiving?

From the Toolbar, select 'File/Archive'

Select the first option 'Archive all folders according to their AutoArchive settings' and then click OK.

Each subfolder in you mailbox (Inbox, Calendar, Sent Items) has a 'Properties" page which you access by right clicking (or Secondary mouse clicking) on the file and selecting 'Properties' from the menu.

The Property options for the folder are shown. Click on the AutoArchive tab. This area lets you turn AutoArchive on and off, allows you to choose the location of the archive.pst, and allows you to input the age at which you begin archiving data. Check with you local Technical Support to see if you may store your offline folders onto a network share (for instance, your personal folder on the network server). For my Sent Items I will archive items which are older than six months.

I may choose to just delete the items which are older than a given age. To do this, I would input the chosen age and then check the 'Permanently delete old items'. This is most useful for the 'Sent items' and 'Deleted Items' folders.

Check each folder in the mailbox for the AutoArchive options to ensure the age limits meet your needs. AutoArchive goes to work when any item reaches it's age limit. If prompted whether or not to Start AutoArchiving in the future, click 'Yes' or 'OK'.

Once we have the folder properties set up to Archive, we need to kick off the initial process of Archiving the mail. From the tool bar click on 'File/Archive'.

Select the first option to 'Archive all folders according to their AutoArchive settings'. The process will begin; you will see information on the Archive process in the bottom right hand corner of the Outlook Application. Don't worry when you see names of folders you did not set up for Archiving, the process will only perform operations that 'you' set up.

How: How do I retrieve archived mail?

Retrieval is a snap. From the toolbar click on 'File/Open/Personal Folders File' an explorer Window opens up to allow you to input the location of the file.

The default location is usually the same as the default location where you created the archive.pst.

Select the archive.pst file and click 'OK'.

The Archive.pst file is opened in your Outlook program. The file is listed in your folder list. Look in the left hand pane for archive.pst. The archive.pst folder will contain the same set of subfolders which you archived. If you archive 'Sent Items' then a folder name 'Sent Items' will be available. The items in the folder will be older than the age which you specified to archive.

The archived items are now available to you. You have all the functionality in the Archive Folders that you have in you mailbox.