MS Outlook Question

Electric

Hi,

In Outlook you can set up a personal archive. We use these in work to keep our inbox's from clogging up and to back up the emails we want to keep.

I'm just wondering what's the maximum size that these archives can be? Our "IT" department says that they can only be 100MB but some people's are around 500MB.

Can anyone shed some light?

Cheers!

seamus

Depends on the version of Outlook and where you're storing the files. Outlook 2000 & XP will support PST files up to 2GB. Outlook 2003 supports 2TB (or something approaching that).

It's good practice to keep these files pretty small. If you're storing them on a network, then Microsoft recommends that you allow them to get no bigger than 500MB.

I would recommend no bigger than 500MB no matter where they are. The bigger the file is, the harder it is to repair or restore when something goes wrong. If you maintain a larger number of smaller archives, then you reduce the risk of something going wrong and you make it easier to fix when something does go wrong. There is no limit to the number of individual archives you can have.

This is why your IT department recommends that you keep them small.

Capt'n Midnight

Outlook 2003 could support files that big if you fiddle around with it under the covers but not with a typical install .

remember a FAT32 partition has a file size limit of 4GB , I've had that real D'oh moment there

IIRC it's something like 8GB or so before it gets upset and a 20GB limit seems to ring a bell too.


the larger a PST is the more likely it is to get damaged even for thing like ending task on outlook, and a larger PST takes much longer to scan/repair, so the IT overhead /downtime increases faster than the size of the PST

if you have an exchange server use OST's instead and if you are scared of having all your eggs in one basked you can use exmerge to export the emails from the edb to PST's, and if you choose the option to only overwrite older ones it's pretty fast

NullZer0

Everythings fine until mailboxed start to get corrupted - then it gets messy and the sh*t hits the fan!