huge archive.pst and outlook.ost files

[Jeff]

I'm running outlook 2000 on my laptop, and I'm trying to
clear off some space off of my hard drive. I noticed that
my archive.pst and outlook.ost files are both over 600
megs. At a bare minimum, I would like to scrap my old
archive file and start from scratch. I tried moving the
archive.pst file to another location and then tried
archiving from Outlook hoping that Outlook would simply
create a new archive.pst file in the designated folder so
I could delete the huge file that I moved. That didn't
work. Any suggestions?

I have no idea what the outlook.ost file does, and didn't
know if there was a way I could delete that as well and
create a new one. Any suggestions on that?

 

[DL]

In OL, New/Personal Folder, and call yr archive whatever eg Archive2004.pst,
create.
Amend the properties of Archive to point to the new pst, ensure this applies
to all folders.
The ost file is I believe generally used in an Exchange enviroment, it may
be that you have OL running in Corporate Mode.

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

Are you connecting to an Exchange server? If so, where is delivery set to -
a PST file or the mailbox? I'm presuming the former, if you have only an
archive.pst file.

OST = offline copy of your Exchange mailbox, global address list, and any
public folders you specified to sync offline (in your PF\favorites tree). If
you delete it, you'll need to re-create it if you want to work offline - the
file size will always be the size of whatever you've selected to sync (by
default, your entire mailbox, but you can use filters if you want)

600 MB isn't that big for a PST file, btw. Can you compact it by
right-clicking on the top-level folder of the PST, properties, advanced,
compact? This will get rid of whitespace - sometimes have to run it a couple
of times.