What can I do about Outlook's huge PST?

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I am an admin with end users taking about 75% of our server space with PST files. DO you know of any utility I can run to compress PST files on servers at night or over weekends?

Sorry, no, not that I'm aware of. If you have some programming expertise, you could write a macro or tool that drives Outlook via it's object model to do the job, but that's all I can think of right now.

I would like to propose the following be considered for the above solution:

Step one: Delete all of the large attachments from Inbox and Sent Items. Sort your Inbox and Sent folders by "size" and then either delete the large message, or just remove the large attachment in the large message. (Hey in most cases, if the attachment was important, you have archived onto you system outside of Outlook anyway!!)

Set the Outlook View to include "size" to do this select "View>Current View>Customize Current View ..." From the View Summary screen select "Fields", and then add 'size'

New Suggested Step: Simple add a new personal Folder to 'Personal Fodlers' section, and move the active folders messages/folders into this new personal folder.

Say you have a Personal Folder called 'Personal-Stuff' create a new one called "Personal-Stuff-new" or better yet Personal-Stuff-. Then open the problem folder, and move the active folders mail items/folders into "personal-Stuff-062005".
(Unfortunately, this may be a slow process, but it will reduce the folder size of the original).

Lastly, you need to sort the original folder by Date 'received' deetermine the earliest message
and then rename the folder Personal-Stuff-; i.e. the first message in the folder was April 1, 2002, rename the "Personal-Stuff" folder "Personal-Stuff-040102"

To backup Outlook can I just make a copy of the outlook.pst file? After a computer change or format can I simply over write the empty pst file with the old one?

thx, dave

Yes, backup all your pst files. That's exactly what I do when I backup my email, or when I move to a new machine.

My .pst file (from Outlook 2000) is so huge it won't open neither in Outlook 2000, nor 2002, nor even 2003. Hence I can't delete anything from it. Any ideas?

Try this article: http://ask-leo.com/my_pst_has_grown_over_2gig_and_now_i_cant_repair_it_what_do_i_do.html

If you have archived email to a separate PST file, you can view its contents by using File->Open to open the PST file holding your archive, then close it again later when you are done. This way you do not risk having your PST file grow to a size that Outlook cannot sustain (which is a risk when importing).

Backing up your PST file will back up your email, contacts, calendar and so forth. It won't back up signatures, preference or layout. This additional information is kept in your user profile.

There are commercial tools around to compact PST files (ask Google) but I haven't used any of them so I can't recommend any as such. The "Compact Now" button is unfortunately not always effective.

i saved my outlook.pst file before i was formatting my hd and setting up w2k again - now i wanted to import the .pst in outlook 2002 SP3 (i was using the same version before!) - the import tool always says "the selected file is not an personal storage folder (.pst) and refuses importing my mails again.. no 3rd party programs could fix it - any suggestions?
thanx, man.. nice that you run your service!

You don't need to "import". Just copy it to your new hard drive, and do a "File, Open, Outlook Data file" on it.

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