Ways to Deal with an Over-sized Outlook PST File

Manage Large Sized PST File

All businesses demand an effective email application and this need forces the advent of an advanced and fully featured program MS Outlook. Some organizations that have moved to Outlook experience high productivity, while others are planning to turn to it. Whether your concern is ease of use, features, flexibility, performance, or interface, Outlook is loaded with all. However, it is also true that everything carries some negatives and so does Outlook. At times, problems with Outlook annoy users; let us see what these problems are and how they affect users.


The major problem with Outlook is size of its data file PST (Personal Storage Table), which is a personal folders file. The file is responsible for storing every data item of all Outlook folders and hence grows every time you add anything to Outlook. It is a good thing that the file is located on user's system and can easily be accessed. The problem is that the file is limited in size or is capable of storing a specific amount of data and if the prescribed limit is exceeded, the file gets corrupt. What do you expect from a corrupt file that consists of all your email data that took you a long time to gather? Of course, you will lose everything, total data loss. Therefore, it is highly important to apply some effective strategy so that the file does not get corrupt and all your data remains safe.

Whatever technique you implement, your goal must be reducing the size of PST. Let us walk through some important techniques that greatly contribute to PST size reduction:

Compact PST File

When you find that your mailbox is filling fast, you start removing irrelevant and unwanted items. Next, you remove them from Deleted Items folder as well and think that your PST file now has sufficient space. However, the space taken by deleted items is not freed and hence the size remains same. Moreover, you cannot reclaim the space occupied by the item even after it has been removed. To remove the free space and increase the size of PST, you need to compact it. When a PST file is compacted, it removes the space occupied by the deleted item and results in a reduced PST file. However, note that the process does not remove all the free space, rather leaves either 16 KB or 4% of total file size. Outlook provides you with a feature to compact a PST file, the process is all-simple.

Split PST File

Another effective strategy is splitting a large sized PST into several smaller files. It implies that all the data of your large PST file is distributed among various files and hence all the files contain data instead of a single loaded file. In Outlook, you can split a PST file with the help of either 'Archive' feature or 'Move to Folder' feature.

Back up PST File

Backing up PST does not relate to any size issues but yes immensely helpful if you come across PST corruption. The most important thing is to take a full backup of your PST file. A backup copy is always helpful whenever you face issues as it can be used to restore data every time. However, make sure that you always have the most recent copy of your PST.

Next, if backup does not seem to be helpful or if it is not correct, you can easily recover over sized PST file data with the help of an external utility. All you have to do is look for an efficient and reliable application.