A technique for handling document or content off-loading from a document processing system to a large repository is disclosed. A document including any possible attachments is copied to a remote repository. The original document in the document processing system is stripped down to a stub document containing at least the information required to retrieve the copied document from the remote repository and enough information for a user to be able to identify the document. If the user wants to view the original document, the stored document is retrieved from the repository. The previously deleted content is re-inserted into the stub document from the retrieved document to restore the original document. The proposed technique is less resource consuming than the prior art approaches and can advantageously be used in mail clients where mail, potentially including attachments, is archived on a remote mail server.