Outlook archive guide -

08 Sep 2010

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	Outlook archive guide

Solution For those of you who use Outlook for email on a daily basis (which is pretty much everybody reading this), you’ll no doubt be aware of the fact that it can hold a ridiculous amount of emails dating back for months or even years. In the event of a system failure, or similar disaster, losing these emails can cause a lot of headaches. This guide is written with this in mind, and will show you how to configure your Outlook archives, and how to safely store them in case the worst comes to pass.

Locating an archive

When you first start using Outlook, it picks a folder that’s pretty well hidden to use for storing archives. This is arguably the most annoying part of performing backup and recovery with them. However, the program also gives you a way to quickly find the archives so you can work with them:

In Outlook, click Tools from the main menu bar, then Options.

In the Options window you will see the following picture. Make sure you click on the Mail Setup tab, then look for the Data Files option and click that.

Once you open the Data Files window, you will immediately see a list of your personal, archive and custom data stores. You can then choose any of them by clicking on them, and then selecting Open Folder just to the right:

This will then open the folder containing your chosen emails, and you can then copy the files and store them somewhere safe. A good place to store them is on your network personal folder – this way, even if the machine needs to be completely wiped, you can always recover your emails later on. This is generally considered to be the best practice, along with backing up to an external data store if the emails are especially important.

If you find yourself needing to create a custom archive for specific emails, this is fairly straightforward to do. Follow the above process, but instead of clicking Open Folder, click the Add button directly underneath it. You will then be asked what type of archive you want to create – some types are compatible with different types of email software, but to minimise confusion there is a description of each type that appears underneath the selection window.

Once you have chosen how to store the files, you will then be asked to choose a location for the new store, and also to provide a name for it.

You can choose your local hard drive, an external one, or a networked folder for storage as a few examples – where you put the store depends on what you plan to do with it, and on how crucial the information contained in it is. (Financial information would best be stored on a networked folder for backup and recovery, while emails about things like the daily price of milk would be better off on your local machine to save space on the server).

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03 Nov 2008 03:49 PM