Posts Tagged ‘external hard drive’

Archive Outlook mail in Outlook 2010 to free space in your mailbox

Thursday, May 15th, 2014

outlook-archive-old-mail-to-prevent-out-of-space-problems-outlook-logo
If you're working in a middle or big sized IT company or corporation like IBM or HP, you're already sucked into the Outlook "mail whirlwind of corporate world" and daily flooded with tons of corporate spam emails with fuzzy business random terms like taken from Corporate Bullshit Generator

Many corporations, because probably of historic reasons still provide employees with small sized mailboxes half a gigabyte, a gigabyte or even in those with bigger user Mailboxes like in Hewlett Packard, this is usually no more than 2 Gigabytes.

This creates a lot of issues in the long term because usually mail communication in Inbox, Sent Items, Drafts Conversation History, Junk Email and Outbox grows up quickly and for a year or a year and a half, available Mail space fills up and you stop receiving email communication from customers. This is usually not too big problem if your Mailbox gets filled when you're in the Office (in office hours). However it is quite unpleasent and makes very bad impression to customers when you're in a few weeks Summar Holiday with no access to your mailbox and your Mailbox free space  depletes, then you don't get any mail from the customer and all the time the customer starts receiving emails disrupting your personal or company image with bouncing messages saying the "INBOX" is full.

To prevent this worst case scenario it is always a good idea to archive old mail communication (Items) to free up space in Outlook 2010 mailbox.
Old Outlook Archived mail is (Saved) exported in .PST outlook data file format. Later exported Mail Content and Contacts could be easily (attached) from those .pst file to Outlook Express, leaving you possibility to still have access to your old archived mail keeping the content on your hard drive instead on the Outlook Exchange Mailserver (freeing up space from your Inbox).

Here is how to archive your Outlook mail Calendar and contacts:

Archive-outlook-mail-in-microsoft-outlook-2010-free-space-in-your-mailbox

1. Click on the "File" tab on the top horizontal bar.Select "Cleanup Tools" from the options.

2. Click "Cleanup Tools" from the options.

3. Click on the "Archive this folder and all subfolders" option.

4. Select what to archive (e.g. Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, Calendar whatever …)

5. Choose archive items older than (this is quite self-explanatory)

6. Select the location of your archive file (make sure you palce the .PST file into directory you will not forget later)

That's all now you have old mails freed up from Outlook Exchange server. Now make sure you create regular backups ot old-archived-mail.pst file you just created, it is a very good idea to upload this folder to encrypted file system on USB stick or use something like TrueCrypt to encrypt the file and store it to external hard drive, if you already don't have a complete backup corporate solution backuping up all your Laptop content.

Later Attaching or detaching exported .PST file in Outlook is done from:

File -> Open -> Open Outlook Data File

outlook-open-backupped-pst-datafile-archive-importing-to-outlook-2010


Once .PST file is opened and attached in Left Inbox pane you will have the Archived old mail folder appear.

 

outlook-archived-mail-pannel-screenshot-windows-7
You can change Archived name (like I did to some meaningful name) like I've change it to Archives-2013 by right clicking on it (Data File properties -> Advanced)

Windows XP: Fixing External Hard / Pen USB stick Missing Shortcuts (Problem with Shortcut) solution

Monday, December 17th, 2012

windows error problem with shortcut the item 689342.exe refers has been changed or moved

I was asked today to fix a computer with 682 GB external Hard Drive attached. For some unexplainable reason, many of the Directories storing hundreds of gygas of precious data become showing up as "Broken Links" – Missing Shortcuts. My first logical guess is that maybe, just a simple hard drive re-attach will be enough in order to solve the problem. Detaching and Attaching the external Seagate hard drive made any change, whether opening the hard drive content with Windows File Explorer, most directories were just showing as Missing Shortcuts, like you can see from below screenshot:

windows XP problem with missing windows directory shortcuts screenshot external hard drisk error

I was a bit sleepy and in a hurry, so at first glimpse I didn't well read the Pop-upped Windows exact error, after carefully reading, I've realized the 689342.exe and the rest of ID.EXE that were trying to open, whether clicked on the "questionable", missing shortcuts is for sure some kind of most likely Polymorphous Spyware / Virus or a combination of both.

The person owning the computer, was quite in shock as most of his data was located on the external HD drive. My assumption of course was that the problem is not so severe as it looks, as I've fixed plenty of Windows-es with mixed up registry, which were mixing how Windows understands windows extensions.
My hope was that the problem will be solved by simply Checking the Windows Registry with – Little Registry Cleaner tool and fixing the irregularitieswith current registry, thus I did a quick scan with it fixed a bunch of registry problems, did the usual Windows restart, but this helped not. Thus I, therefore started a Malware Bytes Anti-Malware Spyware "Swiss Army Knife" prog 🙂. Paralelly with scanning I decided to check if physically files are present on Hard Disk, by dir listing the files in Windows command prompt – cmd.exe , there all seemed okay files and directories were present, I can CD into each of the directories incorrectly showing in Win File Explorer as missing shortcut and all inside dirs was just fine.

Dir listing if files are physically present Windows XP Screenshot

 

I checked for "autorun.inf", as it is so common nowadays that external Hard Drives and USB Sticks are infected with Autorun Virus variations and my guess happened to be right, there was F:\autorun.inf. As it is with the Autorun Virus-es the file was set the hidden and read-only atrribs. I checked it is there with:

> dir /a autorun.inf
...

Then I deleted autorun.inf, by reverting the "hidden and read-only attribs:

> attrib -s -h -r autorun.inf
> del autorun.inf

Though, I hoped this would solve the problem, checking f:\ Directories in File Explorer, continued to be showing Folders linked to the unexisting 689342.exe. Then I read some posts online, discussing the weird "Missing Shortcuts" issue and after a while thx God I finally got the fix, which is as simple as:

> attrib -r -s -h /s /d f:\*.*

This command, took about 20 minutes or so, as there are plenty of data on the hard drive. Also I suppose in some rare occasions the removal of read only, system and hidden windows attributes, might create issues of certain programs installed, however in this specific PC case all was okay and it doesn't really mattered as the really important files to rescue were mostly in .DOC's DJVu, PDF and plain text format along with some movies

 attrib cmd attributes command to fix missing shortcuts on windows XP picture shot

As you can see on below screenshot, I had the Malware Bytes running in parallel along with a Working copy of Avira Free Antivirus, while the above command was running Avira immediately detected a bunch of Virus files, which were offered to be Removed or Quarantined.

After removing, all of the badware and testing in Explorer, all folders in F:\ were showing as normal.
However, though all looked fine, after the completion of Malware Bytes scan and the removal of catched Malware, just to be sure something has not left as viruses I run oneanother Avira AV scan of all Computer Hard drives and did a Restart. This is it enjoy 😉