Archiving with PST

[DJT1]

I one user who gets a lot of email which needs to be kept. At the moment his PST is getting so big (1.5 gig mark) that it is causing problems.
I was thinking of doing the following:
On a Pentium 4, Win XP, Outlook Express 6 -

In six month blocks take all the inbox and sent items and export to a pst.
Create an alternate identity call 2002-1
Load the pst there.
This will allow the user to keep all old email while not effecting his performance.

Does anyone see a problem with the above? Any better ways of going about it?

Thanks.

 

[BWilson77080]

only problem would be that it still takes up space on the hard drive? other than that it will probabaly work

BWilson77080
MCSE2000, A+

 

[PCmad]

Why not look into the auto archive option, which is meant for the purpose you describe. You can set it to appear in so many days or to just do it automatically etc. This will create another pst where you can specify a location and call it say archive.pst. Meaning it will be separate from the main pst. Have a look at the options under Tools, Options, Other Tab, Auto Archive (Outlook 2002)

When people say they have to keep emails for so long, you can guarantee that most emails will have attachments. It is often the attachments that people are more worried about, if this is the case get the user to save the attachments onto a network home drive if possible or if not available local machine. Remember that attachments are the space hoggers not the emails themselves. You can have 100 emails with plain text taking about 200k but one email with an attachment of say 1.5mb as an example!!

Once the attachments have been saved to save space on the pst you can delete the attachments from emails saving valuable space. Eg. Keep the main text on the emails but free the space.

Also remember that when you delete an email the space used is not freed. You have to remember to compress pst files on a regular basis to get the space back. Eg if an email has an attachment that is 20mb, you delete the email the space is not available until you compress the pst. Deleting messages does not reduce the pst without compressing.

Just a few thoughts

 

[HDL1]

I'm completely with PCMAD - autoarchive and compress PST. Also, it might be a good idea to discuss with the enduser the importance of backing up his hard drive or atleast the archived pst, if it is going to be on his local drive. If the archive pst is on a network drive, it is probably (hopefully!) backed up by IS/IT -- and explaining that to the enduser is probably a good idea.

HDL1

Scratch that - it's all smoke and mirrors.

 

[DJT1]

Thanks, the autoarchive sounds like what I'm after. The problem I have is more user than technical but this will certainly get me headed in the right direction. Much appriciated.

 

[G0AOZ]

Well I found that even after deleting probably 1000 e-mails or more, emptying the DELETED ITEMS box and then "compressing", it made absolutely NO DIFFERENCE to the size of the PST file whatsoever. And yes, there is only ONE PST file on the machine...


ROGER - G0AOZ.