Lingering data (2003 sp3)

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If I add an attachment from an external drive to an email, does any part of the attachment get copied onto my local harddrive?

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If you’re using Outlook stand-alone (i.e. not connected to Exchange server), the e-mail with its attachment is stored in your .pst file.
When you delete the e-mail from the Sent Items folder, I don’t think there’s a copy of the attachment left. But specialized utilities might be able to retrieve it as long as the disk space used by the attachement isn’t overwritten.

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I am using Outlook stand-alone. So if I were to make a copy of the .pst file prior to creating my emails with their attachments, I could then restore the .pst file after the emails are sent. Does that sound reasonably safe?

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Again, someone with an “undelete” utility might discover the previous version of the .pst file on your hard disk. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to run this very small risk.

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Thank you Joe and Hans. I see that my accumulated attachments would make the .pst file much larger than the original copied and therefore not completely overwrite the file.

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Adding to what Hans said, if you are using Exchange Server and you have your account set to use cached Exchange mode then you will have a .ost file on your system that contains the same information as a .pst file does.

Joe

--Joe

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