Archiving to reduce Outlook.pst

[Phil vK]

I am using Outlook 2002 and my Outlook.pst file is over 2G and therefore
needs to be reduced. To do this, I am archiving my folders and then deleting
them. The problem is that every time I archive a folder, and new entry
appears in my Folder List with a copy of the folder I just archived and
deleted. I am delteing these also, but the folders named “Archive Foldersâ€
remain and can’t be deleted. Can anyone please help on this or direct me to
some website or other source that discusses archiving in detail? I find
archiving very difficult to understand for some reason. Thanks.

 

[DL]

You are missunderstanding your folder list;
The Personal Folders in the list is your primary data file, if you click the
+ or - next to it, the folders contained in that data file will be closed or
opened.

Any Archive Folders that are then shown are seperate data files (Same as
Personal Folders, just a different name)

Usually you set the archive settings to move mail from your Personal Folders
to the Archive set, on a specific modified date basis. Allthough you can
manually move mail between the two.
An Archive data file has the same size limitation as any data file, so it
may be neccessary to create a second set of Archive Folders, you can do this
in the Archive settings - simply name the new archive in the path/name
section. The Archive will be created next time its run.

You need to archive some 50% of the contents of your Personal Folders set,
then run a Compact on your Personal Folders set in order to reduce its size
to at least below 1gb
A data file created in versions prior to 2003, can fail/corrupt from 1.6gb