Your Outlook email storage has its limits, and chances are, you’ll continue receiving emails regularly. To prevent it from reaching capacity, you can transfer older items you wish to retain to an archive. This archive is stored in a separate Outlook Data File (.pst) that you can access whenever necessary.
Outlook employs AutoArchive as the default method for regularly archiving items. For further details, please refer to ‘Archive older items automatically.’
Additionally, you have the option to manually archive items at your discretion. This allows you to choose the items for archiving, specify their storage location, and determine the age at which an item becomes eligible for archiving.
- Do one of the following:
* In Outlook 2013: Click File > Info > Cleanup Tools > Archive.
* In Outlook 2016: Click File > Info > Tools > Clean up old items
2. Click the Archive this folder and all subfolders option, and choose the folder you want to archive.
3. Under Archive items older than, enter a date.
4. You can create multiple .pst files if you want to archive some folders using different settings. For example, you may want to keep items in your Sent folder longer than items in your Inbox folder.
5. Check the Include items with “Do not AutoArchive” checked box to archive individual items that are excluded from automatic archiving. This option doesn’t remove that exclusion from these items, but instead ignores the Do not AutoArchive setting for this archive only.
6. Click OK.
NOTE: Archiving your emails as per the above instructions will save the emails to the PC/laptop/device from where you are doing it. It’s advised to make an external backup of these emails after the archiving has been completed because if you lose that device or its hard drive fails, you’ll lose all those emails forever.
Also note that you can continue to use these emails as normal but they won’t be available on other devices if your mail was setup in IMAP. If you aren’t sure what IMAP is, check out this article.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on 084 499 8148 or info@webify24.com.
Turn off AutoArchive in Outlook
To archive only when you want, turn off AutoArchive.
- Click File > Options > Advanced.
- Under AutoArchive, click AutoArchive Settings.
- Uncheck the Run AutoArchive every n days box.