Transfer Your Lotus Notes Email Archive To A USB Drive

A few posts back I put out instructions on how to drain off some of your email and folders from the main Lotus Notes server into a Lotus Notes archive. This single activity allowed you to clean up your Lotus Notes database while keeping those important documents for posterity, or for evidence of a job completed.

As shown in these three plates, you can set up the archive to be placed anywhere you want. In this particular example, the archive went to a folder under “My Documents”.

Archiving Lotus Notes email and folders to a local nsf file.

I called the folder “notesarchive” and the actual archive archivedayton because I wanted to put all of my Dayton related email into that location. In fact, I put everything that was in my “Dayton” email folder into this archive.

Archiving Lotus Notes email and folders to a local nsf file. Archiving Lotus Notes email and folders to a local nsf file.

To make things more interesting, after archiving everything in my “Dayton” folder, I could go back and create a new archive called “archivecolumbus”. I would create it in the same fashion to hold all of my email from my “Columbus” email folder.

If I had done this, the end result would have been two archive files – one called archivedayton.nsf and the other called archivecolumbus.nsf. Each one holding all of the Lotus Notes records from the respective folder that was in my lotus notes database.

Here’s the kicker. I can now take those two files and move them to a USB drive if I want. Simply cuttting and pasting will do, as well as a dragging and dropping.

The only hitch is that in order for me to open them, you will need a machine with a properly installed Lotus Notes client. That way when you double click the archive, the client will automatically launch and open the archive file, even if it’s on the USB drive.

Hence the reason for the Google Apps migration. No 3rd party applications required. And I get 7 GB of email storage to boot.

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