Where are attachments saved?

[Blue Max]

We harbor a mortal fear that many of our important attachments are going to
be lost or deleted even though our Outlook 2007 messages have been saved to
a custom folder. Where are the message attachments saved in Outlook 2007?
Are they saved in the .PST file with the messages or out on a drive folder
where they run the risk of being inadvertently deleted, such as in a
temporary system folder of some sort?

 

[VanguardLH]

in message

We harbor a mortal fear that many of our important attachments are
going to be lost or deleted even though our Outlook 2007 messages
have been saved to a custom folder. Where are the message
attachments saved in Outlook 2007? Are they saved in the .PST file
with the messages or out on a drive folder where they run the risk
of being inadvertently deleted, such as in a temporary system folder
of some sort?

Unless YOU saved the attachment somewhere, they are still in the
e-mail as a MIME part within the body.

 

[Blue Max]

Thank you for the reply. In other words, I can save the email in an Outlook
2007 folder of my own making and access both the message and the attachment,
even years later, just by accessing a copy of the message store .PST file
where the message was originally saved, correct?

*************************

 

[John Guin]

Yes. You can test this yourself by saving an email with an attachment as a
mail item in a PST, then open the PST a day a later and open the mail item
and the attachment.

I've been burning PSTs to CDs for 10 years and they all still work fine.

 

[VanguardLH]

in message

Thank you for the reply. In other words, I can save the email in an
Outlook 2007 folder of my own making and access both the message and
the attachment, even years later, just by accessing a copy of the
message store .PST file where the message was originally saved,
correct?

But what if some version of Outlook years in the future cannot read
your old PST file? If you are still using the PST file, it could get
corrupted (so you are left to restoring from your backups but lose
e-mails since then). If you have critical files that were sent via
e-mail, they should have been saved to a file somewhere, like to a
network host that gets backed up (unless you also backup your user
workstations which some enterprise backup software does, like
NetBackup from Symantec/Veritas).

Also, if you never saved the attachment to a file, how do you know the
full and uncorrupted file got correctly encoded into the e-mail? Save
it to a file. sperrysoftware.com has a plug-in to do the attachment
save (with optional delete from e-mail to reduce your PST size), plus
it will automatically save attachments rather than rely on you doing
it.

 

[John Guin]

Good points.

As far as whether future versions will support the PST file... This is
already a big problem for computers in general. I have files from my TRS-80
Color Computer (really!) that I would still like to access. Records of me
jogging and stuff like that. They are stored on 5.25" floppies...no one
makes those anymore, and I don't think Vista even supports it if I had one.
And it wouldn't read that floppy formatting anyway.

So what to do? I keep a Color Computer around. Even then, though, the
chips in it are only rated for 40 years or so, and it's already 20.

Virtual machines & emulation will help. I have Virtual PC installed (with
Windows XP and Office 2003) which I run on my Vista machine. That should
ensure I can get to my data for many, many years to come. But again, there
is no guarantee that 20 years from now the system will still work.

And I'm sure that if we trace this back the first civilizations that tried
to record data were faced with the same problems. Not sure I can do anything
about it

As for whether the attachments are actually saved - well, I've tested them
extensively enough that I've never lost one. Admittedly, a file on a CD (or
offsite server, or hard drive, or USB drive, or anywhere) can get corrupted
and destroyed. Making multiple copies of critical data is one way to
mitigate that potential problem. I learned that lesson when I had three hard
drives all go out on me inside of 60 minutes - including the backup drive I
had.

Saving every attachment as a separate file may work for you. I prefer to
have them saved with the original email and not have to worry about the
duplication of having it saved in a PST and as a standalone file. Just
personal preferences, I guess. That duplication would help mitigate the
chances of corruption, but I don't want to pay the hard drive storage space
costs for that.

 

[Gordon]

Good points.

As far as whether future versions will support the PST file... This is
already a big problem for computers in general. I have files from my
TRS-80
Color Computer (really!) that I would still like to access. Records of me
jogging and stuff like that. They are stored on 5.25" floppies...no one
makes those anymore,

Not new, but look here:
http://repc.stores.yahoo.net/514floppydrive.html

 

[Gordon]

Not new, but look here:
http://repc.stores.yahoo.net/514floppydrive.html

Sorry, didn't see the store is closed!

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