How to recover outlook settings from backup

BackupPC uses hard-links in its storage, so you're not going to be able to just share a folder on the Windows machine to mount on the Ubunut machine for BackupPC to write into.

I'd recommend either using rsync (http://rsync.samba.org/) or Unison (http://freshmeat.net/projects/unison) to synchronize the /var/lib/backuppc/pc/localhost directory to a remote directory on your Windows machine. You're going to lose the hardlinks when you do that, but at least you'll have the files off the box.

Through the use of GPOs, you can manage what happens to .pst files. We auto-archive ours to the network where they're backed up regularly and it's easy enough to bypass them being saved to the local disk.

Archiving email is no panacea for problems endemic to users. That is their need to save everything. You have to practically beat it into their heads that there generally isn't a need to save everything. To that end we have Exchange delete everything in the Deleted Items folder (users were in the habit of using this as another folder and NEVER emptying it.)

Small reminders about cleaning up their email and how it results in efficiencies throughout the organization is helpful, etc., etc.

Edited to add:

Red-gate also has an exchange archiver and based on their other tools, this one should be top-notch.