Overcoming Problems of Large PST Files in Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a very powerful personal information management software. Nevertheless, as you keep using it and storing more and more data in the PST file, chances are that the PST file becomes too large for Outlook to manage efficiently. This results in Outlook stopping during typical operations like downloading email messages, reading email messages, moving or deleting email messages. This can be particularly noticeable when Outlook is trying to synchronize or during mail delivery. As the size of the PST file keeps increasing, you are likely to see that these stoppages become more pronounced and more frequent. The best solution to deal with large PST files is of course to reduce the size of the current PST folder by compacting, archiving old items or simply deleting unwanted items. On the other hand, if the problems seem serious enough to suspect that the PST file may be corrupted, you may need to use third-party software such as Advanced Outlook Repair to carry out a PST recovery.
If you have used an earlier version of Outlook, you may not have faced this problem of large PST files. This is because with the increase in the number of features that the new versions of Outlook were offering, there had to be a change in the basic data structure of the PST files that are typically used to store all Outlook data. This change meant that the more the number of items stored in the PST files, the more the data that had to be written to the hard disk. So along with dealing with a large PST file, Outlook also has to deal with the possibility that the frequent writing to the hard disk may result in the file getting corrupted. It is therefore helpful to have a tool such as Advanced Outlook Repair handy to help you in quick PST recovery.
As mentioned earlier, there are two or three useful ways in which you can reduce the size of the PST file so that Outlook can manage it more efficiently. One way is to eliminate all the unwanted items including email messages, drafts, old appointments, tasks and notes. Deleting them will simply move them to the Deleted Items folder ' you need to remove them from the Deleted Items folder as well to truly ensure that they have been removed from the folder. Next, you could move all old items that you need occasionally from your current PST folder to another storage file. This will considerably reduce the size of the current PST file. Finally, you could regularly carry out compaction of your PST file so that it does not occupy any space needlessly.