Outlook Archiving and how to back up emails into a PST file
Your mailbox should have sufficient space that you don't ever need to archive, but if you are leaving or wish to back up emails into a file which can be shared with others etc, see below (please note this will move emails out of your mailbox into the file, it will NOT copy them) if email are supposed to be copied to a backup PST file rather than copied then please use Migrate and backup Outlook items | Knowledge Base | IT Service Desk
You can archive your emails into an archive file using outlooks clean up tools. This will essentially put them into a kind of Zip file, the file will be a .pst file.
Click the Clean up Old Items from the Tools menu in Outlook
Which brings up the following window where you can select folder to archive, you can archive the Sent folder, or Inbox, even Contacts or if you click the top level email address it will archive and move the entire mailbox to the pst file, you should first check you have enough space on the C drive before running the archive as it will fail.
Also as in above, you need to select the date from which to archive if the emails are quite old you might have to go back a bit and this might create a large file.
It might be best to create a folder in your mailbox called backup or something, then move or copy the emails you wish to that folder from outlook, then run the archive on that folder only or select all emails in that backup folder, right click and select Archive
That way you won't archive unwanted emails as your mailbox is pretty big and you won't want to archive huge amounts in one go or entire folders dating back many years
Please ensure you archive to an area on the C drive and not H or an external drive, once the archive is created on the C drive successfully you can move it to your external drive or shared drive etc. Also space on C should be greater than 50gb as a precaution.
You can see the progress of the archiving if you go back to outlooks main view and check the status bar at the bottom, mine currently says all up to date as most do
Once the archive is complete you will see an Archive folder added to your mailbox and the status bar will change from Archiving.... to the above all folders up to date at which point you should check the new Archive folder and ensure it all looks fine, then navigate to where you created the file and copy it to your external drive.
More information about Archiving can be found here Archive in Outlook for Windows - Microsoft Support
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