Size discrepancy - PST vs personal folders properties/folder size

[E_Net_Rider]

Can someone explain where the space is hidden? My PST is almost 300MB bigger
than the folder size of the personal folders (outlook Today) properties?

Norman

 

[Guest]

Can someone explain where the space is hidden? My PST is almost 300MB bigger
than the folder size of the personal folders (outlook Today) properties?

Norman

basically white space from a very active .pst if quite a bit of mail has
been moved and or deleted. Compacting the .pst should eliminate the issue.

 

[E_Net_Rider]

Sorry, I forgot to mention I already did the compaction thing a few times.
Norman

 

[E_Net_Rider]

Good News!
I may have deleted the items that were causing the problem because the last
compaction brought the two items within 20MB of each other.
Having moved from OE to OL2K I had the two message stores, one for each
(running COW mode).
I have seen some posts regarding whether to export from OE or to import from
OLK. Is one better than the other?

So I was trying to clean up the extra storage which contained probably a lot
of duplication.
Also I come across a large amount of wasted space, as near as I could tell.
Within the OE storage, there was a file that had a " (1) " in its name along
with a file without that. OE certainly wasn't accessing this file, and it
may have been created during one of those times that I had to reinstall OE
to get it to work. I could find no way to force OE to import or access this
file without renaming the corresponding pair. I could see the mail then when
I opened OE, but it would crash before I could do anything with those
messages. Anyone have an answer?
I mention this in this group because it appeared that those messages may
have been imported into OLK already. I wasn't able to verify because of the
short time before crashing. So I don't know if it was imported before the
problem with that file developed, if it did import, or it did import after
because OLK was able to handle it in some fashion. This might be able to
help someone overcome a problem, that is using both programs. But none of
this is verifiable from my machine since I was a bit anxious to get past
that point and deleted that 250MB file. Also there were a couple of other
files that had the unusual naming including one for " folders ". There is
some info about OE recreating this on its own after renaming, but it doesn't
list any consequences of that action. (Maybe that is what started my wasted
space, unreadable file issue)

Norman

 

[Brian Tillman]

Can someone explain where the space is hidden? My PST is almost 300MB
bigger than the folder size of the personal folders (outlook Today)
properties?

Do you have rules? If your PST is your delivery location, rules are kept
there, too, in a hidden folder.

Since watchoutnow's idea didn't pan out, you can always work around the
issue by creating a new PST, making it your delivery location and them
moving everything from your old PST to the new. This will certainly
eliminate any wasted space.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I have seen some posts regarding whether to export from OE or to
import from OLK. Is one better than the other?

Exporting messages from Outlook Express to Outlook is better than importing
messages from Outlook Express using Outlook. The latter changes the
Received time stamp to reflect the time of import. The former perserves the
Received time stamps.

So I was trying to clean up the extra storage which contained
probably a lot of duplication.
Also I come across a large amount of wasted space, as near as I could
tell. Within the OE storage, there was a file that had a " (1) " in
its name along with a file without that. OE certainly wasn't
accessing this file, and it may have been created during one of those
times that I had to reinstall OE to get it to work. I could find no
way to force OE to import or access this file without renaming the
corresponding pair. I could see the mail then when I opened OE, but
it would crash before I could do anything with those messages. Anyone
have an answer?

I suspect that the file with the (1) was a later version of the file
containing the folder and is, in fact, the file that Outlook Express is
using as its current folder repository.

However, I don't see how anything in Outlook Express' folders can have an
effect on how much PST space is reported by Outlook.

 

[E_Net_Rider]

These are answers to above post by you. message may be corrupted as it will
not send a reply.
Does it mess up anything besides the receive time, such as send?

(1) does indicate some later incarnation of what existed prior to trying to
fix a problem. This is documented at MS. I've also learned there is a tool
which allows extracting messages from those dbx files. It may not get all
because of the corruption that existed when the file was in use.
Unfortunately I didn't learn this until I already deleted that 250MB file
and the others no longer in use.

Maybe just coincidence, but I do wonder if Outlook tried to import that
corrupted 250 MB dbx file and that might explain the difference between the
pst and what was shown from within outlook as the total size. After some
cleaning of old messages and other trash compacting worked, except for about
20 MB. Previous to the attempts to consolidate old OE messages with Outlook
and deleting the OE messages, I had been paring down old messages. Several
compactions left a 50MB difference with the pst being larger, each time it
was run. So I've gained 30MB somehow.
I did try to run the inbox repair tool and it failed.


Yes I have rules but they should be very small.

Norman

 

[Brian Tillman]

Maybe just coincidence, but I do wonder if Outlook tried to import
that corrupted 250 MB dbx file and that might explain the difference
between the pst and what was shown from within outlook as the total
size.

Outlook will import folders from whatever files Outlook Express currently
believes contains those folders.

I did try to run the inbox repair tool and it failed.

If the Inbox Repair Tool is failing on a PST, I wouldn't trust that PST.
I'd make a new one and move as much as I could out of the failing one to the
new one and then ditch the old one.

 

[E_Net_Rider]

Same problem when responding to your last post. Do you have any idea what
this is. My search at MS led me to believe the servor was down but that
obviously isn't true. Wasted a good bit of time trying to locate a place
that would give me the servor status.

For below response.
Had to think about that for a moment. If I understand correctly, it sounds
like Outlook must be checking somewhere to find which dbx files within that
identity are currently active and bypassing those that aren't? ie. if (1)
exists for a file then the one of the same name will not be looked at or
attempted to import.

Thanks on the reminder of the pst and inbox tool not working. I suspected
such and appreciate the nudge. After cleaning some of the old un-needed and
attempting to archive, new to me, I'll attempt running the tool again. Same
results will lead me to following your advice of replacing.

Norman

 

[Brian Tillman]

Had to think about that for a moment. If I understand correctly, it
sounds like Outlook must be checking somewhere to find which dbx
files within that identity are currently active and bypassing those
that aren't? ie. if (1) exists for a file then the one of the same
name will not be looked at or attempted to import.

This is a question better suited for asking in an Outlook Express newsgroup,
but if you right-click on a folder and choose Properties, the actual DBX fle
in use will be displayed in the "This folder is stored in the following
file" area. The display area may be too narrow for the entire DBX file
name, but if you click on the field and press End, you can see the whole
name. The left and right arrows will also work in that field.