Need help kinda fast: Lotus Notes archive

So many years ago (six) our company got bought out. Part of the change was that they switched us from Outlook to Lotus Notes.

We all hated it. Lotus Notes is terrible. But over six years, I’ve come to tolerate it. More importantly - I’ve set it up to archive every email older than 30 days. This was a necessity at first, because the company had a crazy low limit on mail file size, but it’s become a real boon. Every email for six years - this is probably the best records storage that I have. I go into the archive at least once a day, to dig out old email threads and to get data (excel and word, mostly) that I’ve sent over the years.

We got bought again, and the new company is on Outlook. We’ve been ordered to switch back, and that will probably happen within a month. But when I went to IT about keeping my Lotus Notes archive they simply said “Nope, not gonna happen. We can’t afford to keep Lotus.”

So if they’re right, I’m gonna lose six years (~4gb) of valuable records. This would be devastating.

Is there a way to keep this in a format I can access without Lotus Notes? I can’t just keep Lotus on my computer; the IT police forbid this. They’ve said email will be transferred, but only email that is on the current email servers - which is only 30 days.

Yes. You need to convert the Notes NSF database to an Outlook PST file. There are numerous conversion tools - just use your favourite seach engine. Or ask your IT guys. Then set Outlook to autoarchive.

Don’t forget to convert your address book too.

BTW the last time I used Notes in anger, it had problems with databases that reached 4 GB. Older versions of Outlook had problems with PST files that got near 2 GB; newer versions are supposed to be okay - one of my users has a 7 GB PST - but we still like to keep PSTs under 2 GB.

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