How to Archive Email in Microsoft Outlook 2013
Archiving is an important process in Outlook 2013 and involves deleting or moving old files to a different file location. Outlook 2013 provides two ways to Archive: AutoArchiving and Manual Archiving. AutoArchiving can be done through the AutoArchiving Settings which contains an AutoArchiving Dialog. This dialog contains numerous options that control how often Outlook AutoArchives, whether Outlook prompts the user before Archiving, and selecting Age Limits for Archiving. Manual Archiving involves similar settings to AutoArchiving and is available through Cleanup Tools in Mailbox Cleanup. Contained here is an Archiving Dialog for Manual Archiving. Backing up the Archives PST folder is particularly important.
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Video transcripts:
Hello and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. We’re now going to take a look at archiving in Outlook. And the general principle behind archiving is that over time your Outlook data file or files will start to get filled up with old items. And it’s a good idea every now and then to clear those old items and to archive them much in the way that in an old paper-based system you might take some of the folders, ones you don’t use anymore perhaps or ones that were more than say two years old and put them in the basement or in a cupboard and lock the cupboard up. Well the archiving in Outlook follows pretty much the same principle and there are two main approaches to archiving in Outlook. One of them is to AutoArchive and the other one is to manually archive and you may choose to either or both of them.
So let’s start with AutoArchiving. Go into Backstage View, go into the Options, click on Advanced, and three sections down we have AutoArchive. Reduce mailbox size by deleting or move old items to an archive data file. So now click on AutoArchive Settings and that brings up this AutoArchive dialog. Now the first thing you can do is to control whether AutoArchive actually runs or not. If this box is unchecked, mine is currently unchecked, then AutoArchiving is effectively switched off and we won’t be able to look at or change any of the other options. But let me just switch it back on for the moment. I don’t actually generally use AutoArchive but you may choose to. But to look at these options properly, we need to switch it on.
So the first option is to choose how often we want AutoArchiving to run. Generally speaking if you’re very short of space, you may want to run that quite often. Also, if you have an awful lot of email going through your system and a lot of things that age, get old beyond your archiving time limit, then you may want to run it fairly frequently to make sure that stuff gets archived very regularly. But if the turnover in your system is low, you probably don’t need to run AutoArchive very often at all.
The next option is prompt before AutoArchive runs. Do you want Outlook to tell you before it starts an AutoArchive rung? If you don’t check that box what happens is that it just starts AutoArchiving possibly when you’re partway through doing something else. On the occasions that I have used AutoArchive and had it setup to run regularly that can be a little bit of a surprise and almost invariably AutoArchive runs at a particularly unfortunate time. But it’s your choice. If you don’t particularly want it to prompt, you can uncheck that and it will just run when it needs to run.
The rest of these settings relate to the AutoArchive process itself and I’m going to quickly go through one or two of them now. Delete expired items, email folders only. If you leave for instance incoming emails in an inbox email folder, then after a period of time it will be considered to have aged and will expire and will be deleted if this flag is set. Generally speaking, with all of my email I don’t leave it either in an inbox or in a sent items folder. I generally move things to more permanent storage using the sort of folder structure I showed you earlier on in the course. But if you do leave these in your basic default email folders, for instance, then those items will expire and they will be deleted if you have this box checked.
So let’s now look at these main options for archiving or deleting old items. First of all, what’s our age limit? Well, our age limit at the moment defaults to six months. So we’re only going to clean out items older than six months. I could change that to another number and either months, weeks, or days. And then I have a choice. I can either move the old items to an archive file or I can permanently delete them. Now let’s suppose I want to move them to an archive file. If I click on Browse here by default, what Outlook 2013 is going to do is to move them into an archive.pst file, in the same folder as my outlook.pst file. I can, of course, choose a different PST file name. I could choose a different folder but that’s the default. So I’m going to stick with the default for my archive file. That will then mean that I’ve got two PST files and I’ll need to backup two PST files; my Live Outlook PST file and my archive PST file that’s got my old content in it. Having set those, what I really need to do then is to say Apply these settings to all folders now, click on that, and all of those folders now have those archive settings set. The archive will run every 14 days. Click on OK and I can sit back and just let that happen. So that’s automatic archiving.
Let’s now take a look at manual archiving. The settings for this are largely shared with the ones that we’ve just used for AutoArchive. The difference here is that, basically, you manually invoke an archive when you need to and you can change settings, specific settings if you want to as a sort of one off exercise. Now in order to demonstrate this, what I’ve done is in the Outlook data file in Projects, the production review project, I’ve put a couple of old emails in it. They’re nothing to do with the production review project, but they’re both just over a month old.
So what we do for this, we go into Backstage View, go into Mailbox Cleanup, and the cleanup tools, click there. One of the options is Archive, and this brings up an Archive dialog. The settings here are very important. The top option, Archive all folders according to their AutoArchive settings. So that’s the one that says basically run a full AutoArchive but instead of waiting for 14 days or whatever the period is run it now. Alternatively, archive this folder and all of its subfolders. Now I’m only going to archive a single folder here, just the folder for the project I pointed out just now. But note you can do things like archive the calendar. You can archive notes. You can archive tasks. But I’m just going to go to Projects. I’m going to choose that production review project and the default date here is set as December 5th. I’m going to change that to March 6th and just check the archive file. That’s still set to archive.pst. That’s fine. Click on OK. Now let me go back into Outlook itself and notice that that folder is now empty. If I go down to archives, however; a new folder structure that’s appeared within archives within projects there is a production review folder and within that I’ve got those two emails. So what it’s done is it’s now created my archive.pst file and it’s archived those two emails into it. When I next run the full AutoArchive, then anything that qualifies according to the criteria I’ve set under AutoArchive Settings will be moved into my archives folder and that’s archiving.
This particular folder structure, the archives PST, I can’t emphasize enough also needs to be backed up. The fact that you’re archiving it is really sort of de-cluttering Outlook itself. Under normal circumstances, I’m sure that you want to keep what’s in your archives so it’s important that you backup the archive PST file as well.
Okay, that’s archiving in Outlook 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
