Locations of items

[johnc83]

Hi all, im a newbie with Exchange so please pardon my stupidity.

I have managed to set up our server to send and recieve e-mails and I can get them to arrive in my outlook inbox. I am fairly confident that my e-mails are on my own PC and also on the Exchange server.

I have created some test Contacts, Tasks and Calendar items but how do I know where they are stored?

I am keen for them to be stored both locally and on the server for redundancy purposes.

Thanks very much for any replies.

John

.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 Express

 

[58sniper]

They are stored in the .ost file in your profile. If you only have a mailbox folder set on the left, it's on the server and your cached copy (assuming cached mode). You don't give us nearly enough info to answer your questions for sure.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Zelandakh]

If you used an Exchange profile to connect Outlook then they are on the server. If you used POP3 or IMAP4 or similar then they may well be on your client.

As Pat says, need more info.

 

[johnc83]

Hi Pat, thanks a lot for the reply. Sorry for the little information but thats because I don't really know anything

On the left I have 'Mailbox - John' and under that I have 'Archive Folders'. I have just deleted my e-mail account through outlook and my tasks, emails etc were no longer available. When I re-added it they came straight back in which leads me to believe they are on the server but I would feel much better if I knew where they were..

In the outlook folder on my PC I have several files including 'outlook.ost' and 'archive.pst' - clearly they are the local copies of all my items but where would these items reside on the exchange server itself, like is there some sort of file on the server that includes these items or is it a case of everyones items being in one big file?

Any help you can give at all would be really appreciated.

Thanks again
John

.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 Express

 

[Trana]

Outlook.ost is basically 'Mailbox John', these items (inbox, subfolders, contacts, tasks etc) reside on both your local computer and on the server, granted you have cached exchanged mode selected. This setting is found on: Tools->Email Accounts->Show or display existing email accounts->Change->look if the box is ticked regarding cached Exchange mode. By using cached exchange mode you might not receive updates to for instant the global address list until several hours after they were done, but the benefit is, if your exchange server goes offline, you can continue working with your offline outlook.ost file and any changes you make will be updated on the server when the server comes back online.

Your other file archive.pst is basically what its called, an archive personal outlook file. The items in this is listed in Outlook under Archive Folders, everything there is NOT located on the server, which is the point of archiving. I prefer to store archive files on a fileserver, so that they get backup along with other files in regular backups, however some companies does not allow outlook archives on their fileservers.

Finally, on the server itself, your mailbox (the equivalent of your local outlook.ost) is not stored as a separate file, its part of the Exchange database in the mail storage.