What can I do about Outlook's huge PST?

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found a great outlook plugin that backs up your address book - its fast.. it wont do the whole pst file but it gets your contacts backed up on a regular basis

www.backupmycontacts.com

Guys, I've got a bit of a problem and was hoping that someone can help me? A lady at our office never archived or cleaned her mail and now the pst went corrupt I can't open it through Outlook to compact it because it is to big and the the scanpst utility can't repair the damn thing. I've tried downlowding tools to compact the pst but they are all trail versions and my wonderful management doesn't want to spend funds to buy a tool and the trail versions doesn't compact the pst. What can I do?
P.S please don't tell me to crack the software because I've tried but can't find a crack or to go to microsoft.......been there, done that, got the frustration!

I am running microsoft outlook 2002 on windows xp. I have approximately 150 pst files totaling over 27 GB. What are the consequences of deleting all but the most current?

You will lose the email contained within the psts you delete.

Great article and tip, Leo. A followup question:

What is the difference between creating a new PST file in Outlook and Archiving in order to reduce the size of your PST file?

Julie

I've never spent much time looking at archiving, so I can't say for certain *exactly* what it does, so I can't really compare. On the surface there should be little difference. Archive probably catches a few things that manual work does not, and possibly vice-versa.

My personal preference is to do it manually so that I do know exacly what's being saved, where, and what's being destroyed.

I have a strange one re the PST file. In Outlook I have two copies of everything even though I only created one. I.E there are two separate copies of Outlook Today (Personal Folders). Everything you do in one appears in the other. I can't seem to find a way to delete the extra one without impacting the original. I have heard of others having the same type of problem, but none of us has ever been able to come up with a solution. It's a pain as it makes the PST file twice as big as it should be. Any thoughts?

I have come across an issue with pst files that i can't get around!

One of the users on our system has 2 additional pst files named archive 1 and 2. They have been filing emails from their main pst file regularly but are now being stopped from placing certain emails into certain folders within the archive. (importantly not all of them).

The pst file is well under the 2gb limit.

The emails that are rejected appear to be random - for example...

i set up a new folder in the pst file and was able to drop all of todays emails into it. I couldn't then drop any emails from yesterday back into it!

The error that appears is "Can't move the items. The file P:\Archive2.pst could not be accesses." (yet seconds before i could drop another email into it!)

The problem with Archiving, is let's say you have 20 subfolders within inbox. Say names of coworkers. When you archive, Outlook creates an archive PST with all 20 subfolders, named correctly, and moves 'some' messages from each subfolder to it's counterpart in the archive pst. Naturally, this can create a nightmare. What I've been doing, is moving the largest subfolders (or groups of subfolders that make sense, clients, accounting, sales, etc.) into their own separate pst. Then you don't get multiple copies of subfolders.

You can shrink a PST with EZDetach (Google ad on this site)

http://www.techhit.com/ezdetach/

Also try this tutorial if you want to use it and Outlook without folders:

http://cnxn.ca/NoFoldersTutorial.html

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