Outlook Archive

Archiving old information is an important bit of computer housekeeping that can help your Outlook run faster and more stable as well as help backup valuable legacy information against data loss, destruction or theft.

Click here for a full video tutorial on Archiving in Outlook 2007.

Click here for a full video tutorial on Archiving in Outlook 2010.

Lets start by opening Outlook and going to File > Archive, the Archive dialog will open, and you should see this,

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Be sure to highlight the Personal Folders you want to archive by clicking it once.

If you prefer to just Archive a folder such as your Sent Items or Inbox then just simply highlight those folders instead.

Notice that Outlook says “Items”, and not “Emails” this is because both email folders AND special folders data will be included in the archive, such as Contacts and Calendar items.

Next pick the date before which all emails must be archived. ( In this example below any items  older than 12/31/2009 will be moved to this new archive pst file created.)

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By default, Outlook 2003 will choose the current date minus exactly three months. To choose another date, click the drop down arrow to open Outlook’s date picker.

To navigate in time to select another month, use the date picker’s left- or right-pointing arrow.

Finally, Outlook lets you choose where to save the archive (a PST file), and what to call it. In Windows XP, Outlook 2003 will save the archive file under C:\Documents and Settings\ [yourUserName]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\, as “archive.pst“.

We recommend you save/create this file somewhere you can find it later such as you’re My Documents or Desktop Folder. I always create an Email folder in My Documents and save/create in there and I always rename the achive.pst to something that will better reflect it’s contents such as, 2008-2009.pst or SentItems2009.pst

Click the Browse button, and navigate to the folder you have in mind. To change the default archive.pst file name, simply type a new name in the File name field.

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To backup your archived PST files, simply copy them to another location off your hard drive, such as network drive or USB jump/flash drive.

 

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