About Personal Folders

About 'Personal Folders' in Outlook

How do I create a personal folder in Outlook?

With Outlook open

Click on Tools
Click on Services
Click on Add
Choose Personal Folders (Make note of where the .pst file resides on your local disk. Preferably, you should place them somewhere within your "My Documents" folder for easy backup purposes.)

An alternate method is to use the FILE menu and select NEW and then, PERSONAL FOLDERS FILE. Watch the Video.

What are personal folders anyway?

Personal folders are files located on your local hard drive that have the .pst extension. You should use personal folders to offload messages from the mail server when your mailbox is reaching is disk quota.

How do I move messages from the mail server to a personal folder?

You can drag an entire subfolder from the Outlook Today tree to your Personal Folders tree or you can drag individual messages to a designated folder within your personal folder.

What are archive files?

Occasionally, you will see a message asking to archive old messages. This feature of Outlook removes messages from your current folder to a special personal folder called archive.pst. You will want to back this file up when you back up your personal folders.

How do I save personal folders to a floppy disk or CDR?

This depends on the backup medium on your computer. First, check the size of the .pst file that you created to determine what you must use for the copy. If you have a Superdisk, you should be able to copy the .pst file to the disk. A regular floppy most likely will not have the capacity. Size should not be an issue with a writable CD.

close Outlook so that the file is not locked (THIS IS IMPORTANT!)
browse for the file in the designated location (My documents, etc.) If you don't know where the file resides, use the Windows search feature and look for all .pst files. From the search results, just select all of them.
right click and copy or drag and drop to your media. Note, that if you are using CD media, you'll have to use the provided CDR software for copying files.