You can’t just “go in and grab” a user’s Outlook mail file. It’s not possible. An Outlook email file is a database; if more than one user/program/process is allowed access to the database, it can get corrupted; so Windows stringently restricts access to that file. While Outlook is running, nothing but Outlook can touch that file. It’s that simple.

This is one more reason to take each user’s email storage and put it on the server. You can’t go into the user’s office at 11:00 p.m. and order them to close Outlook so you can back up their email — but you can put time limits on their login so they get kicked off at 11:00, and you can do a scheduled backup then.

Finally, you might mention to your boss that allowing users to keep emails with possibly sensitive information on their PCs is a glaring and possibly illegal security breach under HIPAA. If there’s any kind of confidential information in those files, your organization is one clueless user, one hacker, and/or one stolen PC away from a nasty and embarrassing lawsuit.

It actually would, but the situation I have to work with is sort of unique. Being part of a University environment, I’ve found since taking the job that these are not folk who’r eused to taking ‘no’ for an answer or changing their ways. I’m hoping to change that in time, but..

In the meantime, my superiors wanted me to specifically do the following (and actually, ths project was undertaken by my predecessor. I have inherited it, so to speak) –

Implement a solution to back up all *local* email storage for these users, on a daily basis, be it a PST file they put on their local machine, or just the default Outlook Data folder. If they’re storing their email on the Exchange server, then it’s not really a problem for me anyway. I should mention that not all these people are on Exchange, we have quite a few still using IMAP. I am actually having to set this up for 5 separate clients: Outlook 2003/2007, Eudora 5.2/6.0 for Windows, Entourage for Mac, MacMail and Eudora 5.2 for Mac. However, I’m only concerned with the PC side at the moment.

The problem is that 1) I cannot be sure people are shutting their computers down or logging off at the end of the day. Being academics, they tend to work strange hours, and very often leave their machines (and Outlook) running all night for some experiment or other. Ideally, I would just run a simple script to shut them all down after a certain time, but I don’t have the authority to do so. So, I cannot rely on Outlook being down at any time of day in particular.

My boss said, specifically, he wants this to “go in and grab their PST files or Outlook data folder, and store it on Dropbox, without any user intervention or assistance.” That’s proving quite a challenge.

I can make this work as a ‘push’ solution from their desktop out to the dropbox server, but my goal is a centralized ‘pull’ solution from the server. I can rule out Backup Exec, because I am unable to purchase that many client licenses (somewhere between 250-300).