Archiving Emails in Outlook in New Offline Data File

Overview

This article will step you through configuring Outlook on a Windows PC to create a offline data file for the purpose of archiving old emails, saving them 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 Home in the top left, then drop down arrow, More Items and then Outlook Data File.
   
3. Windows File Explorer window will then open where Outlook Data files are stored.
   Enter the New Archive Data File name, a name you can easily associate and identify, then Ok.
   e.g. first part of the email address to be archive.
   -> Data File Name could be conetix archive.
   
4. Once you clicked Ok, you should then see in the left hand nav bar your new Data file created for local archiving on PC.
   
5. We can now start to archive Old emails to our newly created Offline Data File.
   Right click on your Email account to be archived, then Account Properties.
   
6. Confirm you have the correct Email Account, then Tools, then Clean Up Old Items…
   
7. 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.
   Archive file – Click on Browse and select the New Data File you created above in Step3.
   Then Ok.
   
   
8. You should now be able to see your normal mailbox, along with the new Archive Data file where any archived folders and emails will be stored for the email address.
   

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

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.

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.