I find it interesting she was archiving on her local hard drive in 2011. Especially given the stories of things people found on hard drives bought at scrap auctions. A better question might be "is it better now?" or not, I'm guessing not.
What's interesting is that in many really large Windows based enterprises I've seen. The space your desktop points to is on a network someplace. You can use this for roaming profiles and all sort of other things (quotas, centralized virus scanning etc.) Everything else on the system is not accessible to the user. So even if you archive your outlook stuff into a PST on your desktop, it's still on the network someplace an admin can get to it. I've even seen this used to recover emails from terminated employee's accounts.
Why archive at all? My guess is that their exchange server has some absurd quote that requires you to purge after you hit 50MB of mail or something. Nobody wants to delete things, so users generally just move old mail into PST files.
