Archiving Emails in Outlook

Overview

This article will step you through configuring Outlook on a Windows PC to archive old emails, saving them to a local data file on your PC.

This can be useful when needing to reduce the storage usage of your email account, as this will move emails off of the server and onto your computer.

Instructions

1. Open Outlook.
2. Click File in the top left.
3. Click Tools, then choose Clean Up Old Items… from the drop-down menu.
   
4. Configure your Archiving settings as follows;
   • – Select Archive this folders and all subfolders
   • – Select the Inbox folder (or a specific folder if you don’t wish to archive the Inbox)
   • – Choose the date for emails to be archived up until
   • – Click OK to proceed
     

5. You should now be able to see your normal mailbox, along with an ‘Archives‘ section where any archived folders and emails will be stored.
   

Outlook will now proceed to archive old emails for you, and save them in a data file stored locally on your computer.

If you wish to archive newer emails at a later date you can simply repeat the above process and adjust the ‘Archive items older than‘ date as needed.

Archived emails are stored locally – this means that if your computer or hard drive fails, the archived emails will also be lost in the process.

Ensure you keep a recent backup of your Archive data file – this data file can by default be found within the “Outlook Files” folder of your computer’s Documents directory.