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~~Parker Renaud, IT Manager, Colliers Keenan, Inc.

Keeping Your Outlook Data Safe

You have a PC at work that runs Outlook on your LAN. Where is your data? On your hard drive? On the network drive? On both? If you are going to back up your data to keep it safe, you need to know exactly where it is stored. 

Generally, on a LAN, your Outlook data is stored in your Mailbox on the Exchange Server. If you look at the top of the Folder List in Outlook, you will see “Mailbox – Your Name”. There is a Mailbox on the Exchange Server for everyone with a company e-mail address.  What is in your Mailbox? All the folders you see in the Folder List, plus any Sub-Folders you create. You can see below that I have created many Sub-Folders in order to organize my incoming e-mail. I use the Rules Wizard to automatically send the e-mail to the proper Sub-Folder. I also have Sub-Folders under Contacts for “Tech Support” and “Colliers IT Managers”. 

Obviously, I have a lot of information, very important to me, in Outlook. Even though I am the network administrator, and responsible for the nightly backup, I back-up this information to my hard drive, and from there to CD. 

Archive

There are several ways to do this. You can “Archive” the folders to a location on your hard drive. To do this:

1.     Click on File>Archive and the dialog box shown below will open.

2.     Select the folder you wish to Archive.

3.     Select the “Archive items older than:” date. This date can be any date you wish. If you archive monthly, your archive files are much smaller and more easily manageable.

4.     Select the location where you want the archive stored. I have created a folder on my “C” drive called “Outlook Archives” so they are easy to find.

5.     Name the archive something meaningful. I archive once a month and name the archive “Inbox 09-01” or “Sent Items 10-01”. Outlook will suggest you put it in the folder “C:\Windows\LocalSettings\ApplicationData\Microsoft\ Outlook\ and name it archive.pst. 

Next time you archive, Outlook will try to add the new information to the old archive and the archive file will get larger and larger. I recommend that you create a new archive name each time you archive.

AutoArchive

Another way to archive is to “AutoArchive”. You can set this up in Outlook 2000 by:

1.     Click on Tools>Options>Other>AutoArchive.

2.     When the dialog box opens all but one box is grayed-out. Put a check mark in the “AutoArchive every:” box, and the rest of the box will be available for customization.

3.     Set the parameters you wish to use. Each folder in Outlook has default AutoArchive settings except for Contacts, which will not Archive. The default settings are as follows:

4.     You may change these settings by highlighting the folder in the Folder List or the Outlook Bar, clicking on Properties>AutoArchive and setting the parameters there.

5.     If you leave your PC and Outlook on all the time, it will not AutoArchive. Outlook only checks to see if AutoArchive is due when the program is opened. 

Export Data

Another way to back-up is to Export your data to a file.

1.     Click on File>Import and Export and the “Import and Export Wizard” will open.

2.     Select “Export to a File” and click Next.

3.     Choose whichever type of file you wish to create. For back-up purposes, select “Personal Folder File (.pst)” and click Next.

4.     Select the Folder you wish to export from and check “Include sub-folders” if desired. Click Next. (Although “Contacts” cannot be archived, it can be exported.)

5.     Enter the Path and Filename of the *.pst you wish to create, select an option, and click Finish.

Personal Folders

An installation of the network version of Outlook does not install any “Personal Folders”, so no data is stored on your PC’s hard drive by default. However, you can create your own Personal Folders.

1.     Click on Tools>Services, and the Services dialog box will open.

2.     Click Add, and select Personal Folders from the “Add Service to Profile” box.

3.     Set the storage location, name the Personal Folder, set the Encryption, enter a password, if desired, and click OK.

4.     The Folders List will now have a new folder named whatever you named your Personal Folder.

5.     You can now copy data from your mailbox folders to your Personal Folder. You will need to re-copy this information periodically to keep it up-to-date since the Outlook   synchronization does not involve personal folders, but you can store a useful copy of your data right in Outlook. 

Retrieving Archived or Exported Data

You can retrieve your Archived, AutoArchived, or Exported data in three ways:

1.     Import the archived items into the same file from which they were archived.

2.     Create a new Personal Folder file and import the archived items into that.

3.     Click on File>Open>Personal Folder File (.pst) and navigate to your archive file. 

If you decide you want to back up your Personal Folder file to removable media, you will need a Zip, Jazz, writeable CD or a re-writeable CD since Outlook Personal Folder files tend to get very large. If you do back them up to a writeable CD, they will become read-only files. Outlook requires read/write access to a Personal Folder file, but a writeable CD provides read-only access. Therefore, you will need to copy them to your hard drive and change the file properties from read-only, before attempting to retrieve the data.

Archiving, AutoArchiving, Exporting, and creating Personal Folders, each provide a way to back-up your data. If you use them, there is no reason to ever lose any Outlook information.

Parker Renaud is the one-man IT department at Colliers Keenan where he manages 90 PCs on 5 servers.