Backing up your email locally in MS Outlook 2010

Your MIT email account allows you to configure Outlook to view the email that you have on the mail server. In order to preserve any important messages you can create a folder on your computer to move some of your messages into. This procedure will allow you to create an offline file and move mail off of the server and onto your local machine.
Creating a backup folder

1. Open Outlook
2. Go to the ribbon and select the Home tab
3. In the New section, select New Items
4. When the menu appears, select More Items followed by Outlook data file
   
   
   
5. Go to the File Name text box and input the desired name for the file. Be sure to leave the .pst extension.
6. If you wish to add an optional password to the file, check the Ad Optional Password checkbox.
7. Click OK
   
   
   
8. You should now see the new folder listed among your Outlook folders 
   

At this point you can simply drag the emails you wish to save into the new folder. This mail will now be on your local machine.

Note that this is best done with smaller chunks of mail.

Also, it would be best to take some time and clean out your mail first getting rid of all the mail that is no longer relevant.