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Personal Folders are files that reside on your disk storage, either those on your PC, or those on the File Stores. Outlook treats the Personal Folders precisely as it does other folders, thus allowing you to have email stored outside your Mailbox, and thus not subject to your Exchange Quota.
When the Computing Service install and configure Outlook, you are given Personal Folders on your M: drive, M:\outlook\outlook.pst Some installations may not have this, either because Personal Folders were not set up at the time the machine was configured, or the settings have reverted to the defaults because of disk problems.
The way to examine and/or modify your Personal Folders varies with the version of Outlook. To see how your Outlook is configured, first see if Data File Management is available in the File menu. If it is not, you have an early version of Outlook, and we would advice upgrading to a more recent version. Contact the Help Desk for details.
If you do have Data File Management as an option, click it. A screen will pop up, which may appear like this ..
or like this
In either case, you should click the Add button.
Highlight Office Outlook Personal Folders if it is not already so, then click the OK button
Navigate to the place where the Personal Folders are kept, or you wish a new set to be kept, type some suitable file name in the File Name box (this may be the name of an existing Personal Folders file, or a new one, which will be created). Click the OK button, and you will be returned to the Data Files page, now with the addition set of Personal Folders.
Give the Personal Folders a suitable name (this will appear in your Folder List). You can at this point also specify
a password for the Personal Folders. We strongly advise you not to do so. The password is unlike your login password,
which can be reset should you forget it. The Personal Folders password is used as an encryption key for the data in the
folders, so should you forget the password there is no way of ever accessing the email.
Click the OK button.
Click the Close button.
You may have any number of Personal Folders files.
There are pros and cons for any choice of where to put your Personal Folders:-
M: drive
Having your Personal Folders on your M drive allows you to access your email from any
machine on which the M drive may be mounted. It is possible to restore email lost from
Personal Folders on the M drive, as these are backed up daily (in this regard, Personal
Folders are an improvement on your Mailbox: mail kept on folders in your Mailbox cannot
easily be
recovered from backup). The major disadvantage is the your M drive is itself subject to
quota, so your scope for mail storage is still limited.
If you choose to have your Personal Folders on your M: drive, you should take care not to exceed your disk quota (use the diskquota command on unix4 regularly). Outlook will expand your Personal Folders file if necessary, and has no way of knowing that you have reached your quota limit until the file expansion fails. This corrupts your Personal Folders file, making your Personal Folders inaccessible until repaired (use the Inbox Repair Tool, SCANPST.EXE).
Hard disks on your PC
Storing your Personal Folders on, for example, the C: drive on your PC would give you
large amounts of space. It may thus be your only option if you really need to store email
by the gigabyte. But you are then constrained always to read your Personal Folders on that
one PC, making it not an option for students who read email in the labs. And you will have
to take responsibility for backing up the email.
Removeable Disks on the PC
The great advantage of having your Personal Folders on a floppy disk is that it allows
you to transfer your Personal Folders from one exchange service to another. So you can
take your email with you when you leave. Space could be a problem, certainly using 1.4
megabyte floppy disks. 120 megabyte Superdisks, or ZIPS, are more feasible, if you know
the remote system has suitable drives.
CD
It is possible to write your Personal Folders to CD, should you have a CD writer. And
this may be a convenient way of transporting your Personal Folders to another machine. But
it is not possible to read your Personal Folders with a read-only CD drive: reading your
Personal Folders involves writing to the folder. It would be necessary to move the
Personal Folder off the CD to some writeable media before reading the mail.
Personal Folders may be encrypted for added security, and/or compressed to save disk storage. It will, of course, be necessary to decrypt and uncompress before reading the email. It is also possible to set a password on the Folders, which will then need to be provided before Outlook will open them. By default, we do not set a password. Set one if you wish: but please bear in mind that, should you forget your password, the Computing Service will not be able to help you. Neither will Microsoft. The password is used as an encryption key, making the file totally unreadable.