AquilaTip: Archiving
With email now being the primary form of business communication, it’s no surprise that everyone has massive mailboxes. This can be a problem if you use Outlook as the more mail you have the slower it can get. Deleting mail is one option however often you might want to keep mail for longer periods, or perhaps indefinitely.
Archiving can reduce the strain on Outlook but you need to keep your mail safe should you wish to access it at a later date. The problem with local archives is that archive file resides on your local machine, so it can easily become lost or corrupted.
1. Online Archiving
If you use Office 365 you may be able to use Online Archiving, which can be turned on by Aquilatec. As the name suggests, the archive is stored online rather than locally, so is accessible from any machine with an internet connection. Your archive will be accessible through Outlook 2013 or above (pro versions only), or via a web browser. The data is much safer and there’s almost no interaction required from yourself.
2. Alternatives?
An alternative to archiving is to use a modern version of Outlook, 2013 or above and only allow it to cache a small amount of your emails locally. That way if you need to go back further you can do so online via webmail.
3. Dates
If you do want to archive locally then you should try to do it in sensible date blocks. We suggest archiving up to the end of July or December. This way the mail is stored in 6 or 12 month blocks. You should also save any archive “PST” files to a folder clearly named. Perhaps name this folder ‘Outlook Archive’, which you store within a location that is backed up (usually My Documents).
4. Take care!
Try not to have a single large archive file as that too can be slow to access and can easily become corrupted