Outlook Backup (O2k & OXP)

[Splash]

I had a quick review and cant see any recent discussion of utilities that perform a backup of selected messages from outlook
Not the whole pst just selected folders
Ideally it would save the messages, contacts or whatever in a tree structure that mirrors the file strucutre of my inbox and folders
The messages could either contain the attachments if any or they can be stripped and saved seperate to the messages preferably leaving a reference in the message to the place where saved.
Messages saved need to be in an accessible non-proprietary format - preferably RTF or .msg
I have done some searching and followed links from the slipstick.com site and have seen a few commercial offerings
Most i consider to be very expensive
I was wondering what others do to back up their Outlook and keep their PST down to a reasonable size
Thanks for any responses

[HansV]

>> I was wondering what others do to back up their Outlook and keep their PST down to a reasonable size

I use the built-in AutoArchive feature, but of course, that saves to another .pst file, not to "an accessible non-proprietary format"...

[Splash]

Of Course i auto archive as well but there are limitations on that
First it doesnt archive all messages - only the old ones
It doesnt seperate attachments
The PST files are quite large
And I don't think you can specify a location to save them (like say a network drive)

There is a MS plug in available now which you can use to regularly back up your whole Outlook pst to a specified location
It's called the Outlook Personal Folders plugin
It overcomes some of the above but still saves user selected folders as a pst

Thanks HansV for your reply
Anyone else want to share their back-up strategy?
Even if it is a manual system rather than software
thanks all

[jscher2000]

I sort messages into a couple of different PSTs and back those up (with the plug-in, or manually, when the mood strikes me). There really isn't a single, non-proprietary format you can use for all messages. They either want to save as MSG (Outlook-only format) or their native format (e.g., TXT, RTF, HTML). As for separating attachments, there have been VBA solutions for that posted here in the past; I wouldn't necessarily want to do that myself, as I suspect that would increase the likelihood of not being able to understand the whole context. An off-the-wall approach would be to install a local IMAP server, set up and account on it, and drag the messages to it. They should be converted to RFC822 format, which is something of a standard, even if it is not nearly as compact as it could be.

[Splash]

Thanks jscher some good thoughts
I will check out the VBA scripts too
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[JohnBF]

As JScher2000 notes, backup strategies can be as complicated as you want them to be, and saving each message to another file format is less efficient than a PST, unless you do something like vacuum them all up into Zip file. But you reminded me that I have been intending to write some code which reports folders by message age, since I want to move inactive customer folders to an archive PST. I'll post that at some time in the future when I get it! Meanwhile, did you look at Slipstick?