asked on

Outlook and .PST Folders

I am trying to find a "Best Practice" method on how to separate .PST files by year. Currently I have a 14 GB .PST file that is becoming too large. It opens fine in Outlook 2016 but I am afraid I will lose functionality in the near future. I am trying to be proactive and trying to find out if I can separate my current .PST (14 GB) into smaller .PST files

Thanks in advance

Bill Prew

You can certainly break out your old items by year into smaller files. Using the Archive tool can help with this, just do a little testing first to make sure you are getting the results you want. And once items have been moved out be sure to compress the old PST to reduce it's size.

I assume you don't need them all open all the time and indexed, right? Or are you planning to have the many smaller files also open, that will still cause some overhead and slowness with Outlook.

Another strategy is to archive into subject based PST files rather than date related ones, this depends on the information you have and how you might want to locate or access it in the future. I have actually used a combination of both - keeping several larger topic related PSTs for large projects or applications, and then placing the remaining "miscellaneous" items in year based PSTs.

»bp

John

I use Archiving as per the above post and it works very well. It keeps my main PST file small and Outlook 2016 works very well. I index my Archive files and that does not cause any performance issues in daily use.

Remember the limit for PST files in Outlook 2016 is 50 GB (although I do NOT recommend this).

cmdolcet

ASKER

Bill,

I have the 14 GB .PST file. I would like to create yearly breakout from each .PST file.

SOLUTION

John

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Bill Prew

membership