Our Outlook PST Files are Too Big

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I hope I’m not wrong, but from what I know, Outlook 2003 or newer can manage PSTs over 2GB.
But if you created your PST file with an older version, then it’s limited to 2GB.
There’s a solution if you have Outlook 2003 or newer: just to create a brand new PST using the 2003 format, then copy everything from your old PST to the new one. And you’re done.
Hope it will help.

Or, why not make multiple PST’s and split up your e-mail/filters? I currently run three different ones, with one dedicated to personal, another to business and the last to my blog.

Here’s an unlimited plan.

http://www.exchangemailhosting.com/exchange/plans/

Cheers.

If file attachments in Outlook are part of the problem with large file sizes, and they are for me at work too, try Attachment Save by Sperry Software, here:

http://www.sperrysoftware.com/Outlook/Attachment-Save.asp

It saves files attached to Outlook messages to a folder on your hard drive that you get to specify and replaces them in the message with an active link. You can run it on existing messages and configure it to run automatically on incoming mail.

Works great.

I don’t understand why PST’s are even an issue if your going to be using Exchange, most likely a hosted exchange service will be using the Enterprise edition in which the mailstore limit is 16TB if memory serves me right. PST’s really only come into play when your using pop3, otherwise everything resides on the exchange server in the mailstore.

If you like Copernic, you’ll love Isys Desktop Search and dt Search. Isys is especially good and being able to construct or reconstruct all sort of conversations or relationships about email messages and files, no matter how or where they are stored.

I’ve been running Outlook 2003 for about 3 years now under WIN/XP and have had severe performance issues as soon as the PST size grows larger than about 800M. I’m reasonable certain of this because the problem disappeared after I went on a rampage destroying email with large attachments and compactifying the PST. I would hate to think of how it would work if I were to let it approach 2GB. I only have 1GB of storage on this puppy so mabe that is the caue.

Clean out your sent items & along with your deleted items. Can’t tell you how many times when troubleshooter a user’s account – that fixed it.

Depending on the format of the house documents (such as PDF) – might be about to reduced the size of the file, and reattach to said email.

Good Luck!

This is a constant problem at work with our users.
We have quotas in place that limits our staff to 100mb of email (unless a director or their job function requires a greater limit) annd we are constantly battling people who demand more storage when their job doesn’t warrent it.
PST files are something to try and avoid as much as possible (something like 30% of the company I work fors data on our san comprises of pst files!) because they corrupt easily, if they aren’t on a network storage that is backed up it’s easy to lose the file in some way (deletion, hardware failure of the drive it’s on etc) and it’s taking the data away from a central location and means should you wish to access that data on say a mobile device or thru webmail you’re screwed :(

The problem here is that email has grown beyond its initial conception and people are using them to either keep all communication indefinately and simply not spending time to maintain their mailbox or use it as a massive file store and as a replacement for old technologies such as ftp.
People are relying upon email as a source in legal battles too, even tho email is so easy to fake and has zero security about it (pretty much most of the traffic is easily snoopable). People are always stunned when I tell them that there is never a garauntee that an email will ever make it to its destination – they just believe that you click and it arrives, any NDR they get seems to always be 100% our email systems fault (even tho the NDR tells them why it failed, which 99% of people never bother to read anyway) in their eyes.

Couple this with the spam issue (our latest stats put legitimate email in our company at about 3.4% of all incoming mail traffic!) and it has just left me thinking that email is simply broken and distorted completely beyond it’s original idea and we definately need to find an alternative that can do what people expect from email without half of the structural problems that email seems to have.

sorry if this is a double post, rather weirdly it’s showing up on my work pc but not on any other pc I view this on :S

This is a constant problem at work with our users.
We have quotas in place that limits our staff to 100mb of email (unless a director or their job function requires a greater limit) annd we are constantly battling people who demand more storage when their job doesn’t warrent it.
PST files are something to try and avoid as much as possible (something like 30% of the company I work fors data on our san comprises of pst files!) because they corrupt easily, if they aren’t on a network storage that is backed up it’s easy to lose the file in some way (deletion, hardware failure of the drive it’s on etc) and it’s taking the data away from a central location and means should you wish to access that data on say a mobile device or thru webmail you’re screwed :(

The problem here is that email has grown beyond its initial conception and people are using them to either keep all communication indefinately and simply not spending time to maintain their mailbox or use it as a massive file store and as a replacement for old technologies such as ftp.
People are relying upon email as a source in legal battles too, even tho email is so easy to fake and has zero security about it (pretty much most of the traffic is easily snoopable). People are always stunned when I tell them that there is never a garauntee that an email will ever make it to its destination – they just believe that you click and it arrives, any NDR they get seems to always be 100% our email systems fault (even tho the NDR tells them why it failed, which 99% of people never bother to read anyway) in their eyes.

Couple this with the spam issue (our latest stats put legitimate email in our company at about 3.4% of all incoming mail traffic!) and it has just left me thinking that email is simply broken and distorted completely beyond it’s original idea and we definately need to find an alternative that can do what people expect from email without half of the structural problems that email seems to have.

First of all, Outlook 2007 offers some fantastic benefits in the performance realm. It can handle larger PST loads than previous versions.

Second, Outlook 2003 and 2007 can support up to 20GB PST files, not 2GB (the limit for 2002 and earlier).

Third, for Exchange server users, consider a solution like GFI Mail Archiver… it can archive all messages to an SQL database and then use Exchange retention policies to keep your mailbox clean. May not be an option for your hosted Exchange setups, though, depending on how flexible the host is.

Thanks GoodThings2Life for your comment regarding Outlook 2003 and 2007 and their ability to support PST files in excess of 2GBs (I didn’t know they could up to 20GB – wow!). I had been reading this post and thought I was crazy being that my PST files with Outlook 2003 were around 3.8 GBs and everybody on this post had been saying it was not possible. Thanks!

What I do is I have separate PST file for each month. PST file as large as 2GB would be so slow.

Hi, I like your idea of separate pst files for each month, but how to set it up to do that automatically?
I have 150+ laptop users on an Exchange server who are all struggling with Outlook 2000 and V-large PST files. If I could set up a system whereby they archive AUTOMATICALLY to a new pst file each month, then problem would be solved, and much af the hassle I deal with would dissolve away!

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