Archiving pst file

[Jorge Cervantes]

I have two questions on archiving pst file.

a) Is auto-archiving reliable? Which method is reliable between manual and
auto archiving? Your suggestion would be appreciated.

b) When I looked at Outlook folder, there were a few archived pst files
already: archive5.pst, archive6.pst and archive.pst.
I understand the numbered archives but I do not what the un-numbered
archive.pst is. Could someone explain what archive.pst is about?

Jorge

 

[Roady [MVP]]

a) Yes, as long as your original configuration is healthy of course but that
is the same for most options in order to work reliable ;-)
I'm not sure what you mean with your second suggestion. You can archive
manually as well of course and then you can be as selective as you want to
be yourself. Personally; I don't use AutoArchive and my pst-file is
currently about 2.5GB. For me it is more convenient, not slow in performance
and not slow for backing up. But your mileage my vary of course based on
your configuration.

b) Actually your understanding should be the other way around. By default
Outlook only has the archive.pst. Any additional archive files are the ones
you have configured yourself or are from other mail profiles for which you
have archiving enabled.
Why not simply look what is in those archive files?
Use File-> Open-> Outlook Data File...

 

[Jorge Cervantes]

When I looked at my Outlook.pst file, its size was 13 GB.
So I initiated a manual archiving. The size of the newly archived file was
only 271 kb.
But the size of Outlook.pst was not changed at all: 13 gb.
I thought that archiving would remove some files from Outlook.pst into a
newly created archive.pst.

Secondly, I removed archive5.pst and archive 6.pst from Outlook folder into
a folder in my harddrive (to save it).
When booted, Outlook is looking for both missing archive5.pst and archive
6.pst. This means all that pst files should not be removed from Outlook
folder. Am I correct?

Jorge

 

[Roady [MVP]]

If you directly want to compact the pst-file see;
http://www.msoutlook.info/question/81

If it is looking for those pst-file, you obviously had them linked before in
Outlook yourself; this is not something that Outlook did. To disconnect the
unused pst-files, you can do so via
File-> Data File Management...

When I looked at my Outlook.pst file, its size was 13 GB.
So I initiated a manual archiving. The size of the newly archived file
was only 271 kb.
But the size of Outlook.pst was not changed at all: 13 gb.
I thought that archiving would remove some files from Outlook.pst into a
newly created archive.pst.

Secondly, I removed archive5.pst and archive 6.pst from Outlook folder
into a folder in my harddrive (to save it).
When booted, Outlook is looking for both missing archive5.pst and archive
6.pst. This means all that pst files should not be removed from Outlook
folder. Am I correct?

Jorge

 

[Pat Willener]

How much did your manual archive actually archive - 1 message? An empty
PST file is 265KB, and 271KB is just 6KB more - about the size of one
message. I think something went wrong with your manual archive.