15GB of Email?

Posted Fri Jan 29, 2010 in

A few years ago I ruminated on 100MB of Email. I haven’t checked lately, but a couple of months ago I looked at the size of my office email database (sucky Outlook) and it was about 15GB (of email and attachments).

Over a period of about six years, my email storage rose a couple of orders of magnitude. That includes the attachments, which have grown substantially over the last few years.

I archive the email associated with each project when I close out the project. The email archive (and I’m using an Outlook PST for the moment) goes into the project directory, which is stowed in the “completed projects” directory on my external hard drive. A copy of that directory is made each week during my regularly-scheduled maintenance. When I add new projects to the completed-projects directory, I flag them (color the directory listing). Every three months or so I burn all the newly archived projects to a DVD and store it. Then I reset the colored directory listings to “normal.”

I think there is little reason to archive all this material. Once the project is finished, it is unlikely I’ll have to return to it for reference. But, sometimes I need something I did for a previous piece of work. Sometimes litigation happens and I need to recover the email archive. It’s worth the small effort to trap that material and keep it for later reference.

I’m still ruminating on the amount of email I have archived. I have a lot of personal email as well. I’m seriously considering trashing the lot of it and only keeping those things that are required for the business portion of my life. The other material is transient in nature and I think I’ll never go back to re-read a bunch of old emails. That’s particularly true given the nature of some of the “stuff” in them.

It’s a thought…