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Managing Huge ost files
I have an exchange 2010/outlook 2010 environment, and I have a number of users that have multiple mailboxes set up in their Outlook. Each mailbox often has its inbox with dozens and dozens of subfolders set up. Sometimes when they add a subfolder the subfolder disappears and I then have to delete their profile and ost and rebuild it, and then it works. The issue at hand is that some of these ost files are 35-40 Gb in size. Yes, that is correct. Many of the emails have pictures and or video clips as attachments, and the mailbox size can grow rapidly. My concern is the size of these ost files. Is there a problem having such large ost files? Is there a way to keep these sizes down?
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How can I reduce OST sizes?
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I have my clients archive their email and keep inboxes to 10GB or less.
I prefer to save Video clips into folders and out of Outlook.
I have been doing this for years (over a decade) and it works well.
I prefer to save Video clips into folders and out of Outlook.
I have been doing this for years (over a decade) and it works well.
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Instead of having people do the "extract content and delete the mail" manually, there are simple solutions allowing to extract content and replace by a link, which might be better, as they still have the mail to search for ...
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Yikes! It sounds like your letting your end-users control how things are done.
First off if there storing large files, photo's, reports, videos, in email format then your need to change that business practice.
Your best bet would be to create a DFS Share on a sever that is backed up and then set it up so the folks can just use the hyper-link to it.
But if you don't want to go by best practices then turn off cache mode and this will help to reduce the size.
Also if you have sharepoint and they have sync enabled (your see Sharepoint List's in the outlook settings) this will also lead to large OST files.
First off if there storing large files, photo's, reports, videos, in email format then your need to change that business practice.
Your best bet would be to create a DFS Share on a sever that is backed up and then set it up so the folks can just use the hyper-link to it.
But if you don't want to go by best practices then turn off cache mode and this will help to reduce the size.
Also if you have sharepoint and they have sync enabled (your see Sharepoint List's in the outlook settings) this will also lead to large OST files.
ASKER
If I disable cached mode, how will they be able to rapidly retrieve email from, say, a year ago if they want to find it. Also, wont that put an incredible burden on my network resources if everytime someone opens outlook, it has to retrieve all that email?
Without cached mode, you are working on the Server. You don't have to download anything to the PC first. The server has already downloaded the data, you are just viewing it, or it might temporarily download the message you are viewing, but not the complete mailbox.
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@ Qlemo and Rindi:
My concern is what does this do to network traffic and server resources, if every time someone needs to view an email, it has to pull it from across the network and use the exchange server versus a local copy on the workstation. Also, how does this impact Outlook speed and performance AND searching and indexing?
My concern is what does this do to network traffic and server resources, if every time someone needs to view an email, it has to pull it from across the network and use the exchange server versus a local copy on the workstation. Also, how does this impact Outlook speed and performance AND searching and indexing?
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@ Qlemo:
Qlemo, you wrote earlier:
"Instead of having people do the "extract content and delete the mail" manually, there are simple solutions allowing to extract content and replace by a link, which might be better, as they still have the mail to search for ... "
What kind of solutions were you referring to? This sounds interesting.
Qlemo, you wrote earlier:
"Instead of having people do the "extract content and delete the mail" manually, there are simple solutions allowing to extract content and replace by a link, which might be better, as they still have the mail to search for ... "
What kind of solutions were you referring to? This sounds interesting.
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Still I would recommend please install all new updates of Outlook version, also try to create and delete folders in OWA. If issue is not there then it is very clear Outlook OST large size can be an issue.