What happens to my Office 365 mailbox and records when I leave Columbus State?
Depending on your status (Employee or Student) your mailbox will remain open for a period of time (see below for details).
Before you leave Columbus State, you must take all the data you want to keep and save it to personal devices. You should also transfer ownership or grant access rights to data that you own but that will remain at Columbus State for others before you leave.
Please respect FERPA, HIPAA, personal identifiable information, intellectual property rights, and other privacy rules when taking files/data with you from the College. Some data may require permission
Students
Eligibility for your College provided email account will end two years after graduation or after two-years of non-enrollment. If you continue to take courses, your account closes two years after completion of your last class. If you become employed at the College before the two years are over, your account will remain open.
Notifications will be sent before the account closes to provide time to create a new account elsewhere and move messages and records.
Employees
Account for faculty and staff remain open but are disabled following the official separation of the employee. After separation for 90 days the former employee login accounts and associated records are deleted. The Office 365 mailbox, OneDrive, and SharePoint will be deleted after the 90 days.
Create your backups
Follow these instructions to backup your email and files.
Backup your email
Step 1) Download your Columbus State email on your personal computer
To export your email account, you will first need to download the Outlook desktop client on your personal computer and sync your Columbus State email. To download the Outlook desktop client and sync your email, you will need to:
- Log into your account at https://portal.office.com.
- Navigate to the upper right of the home page and click Install Office.
- Follow the installation instructions provided by the webpage (for more details, see the article Office 365: Install on a Personal Computer.
- Activate Office by opening Outlook and inputting your full College email address and password.
- Setup outlook by following the instructions in the article Outlook Email: Install on a Computer.
- Click Finish and restart Outlook.
Note: While you will be able to send and receive email with your College account via the desktop client while it is active, once your email account is no longer accessible, the client will no longer be able to connect. Even if you’ve already set up a desktop client, you should still back up anything you need before your account closes.
Step 2) Export Your Email Account
Now that your Columbus State email is on your personal computer, you need to export the data:
- Navigate to the File tab in Outlook and select Open & Export.
- Select Export to a file, then click Next.
- Select Outlook Data File (.pst) and click Next.
- Choose to export your whole email account (email, calendar, and contacts) by selecting your email address at the top. Or select a specific folder to only export that folder.
- Select a destination for your back up files to be saved.
Note: You can export your new .pst file to an external storage device or to cloud storage so that you can access the files from another computer. Please remember to completely close out of Outlook if you want make copies of your new .pst file or to move the file to a new location
Backup your files
OneDrive
Follow these instructions to back up your Columbus State OneDrive files:
- Download OneDrive for Business from onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/download
- Log into your account at portal.office.com.
- Navigate to your OneDrive tile and click on it to access OneDrive.
- Click Sync at the top of the page and then Sync now in the pop-up window.
- Allow a few minutes for your files to sync.
- Open File Explorer and locate OneDrive in the left column.
- Select OneDrive and right click to choose Copy from the menu that pops up.
- Right click in the folder where you’d like to save your back up file and choose Paste from the menu.
Network drive
To backup your files from the Columbus State network drive, see the Downloading / Editing Files section of this article: Network Drives: Online Storage Website