Tech Tip

Making Sure You Don't Loose Any Email Data

Like millions of other people, you may be using a version of Microsoft Outlook that's older than Outlook 2003. If so, you may not know that your Outlook file (PST) cannot exceed 2 gigabytes (GB)* of storage.

For people who use Outlook frequently in a home user environment, this can be a real problem. The PST file contains all your emails, folders, and contacts as well as all your calendar, task, and journal information. Some people have found out about this limitation the hard way. When Outlook became overloaded and stopped working, they almost lost all the data in their PST file.

Some Helpful Tips

To make certain you avoid this problem, here are some practical suggestions:

• Perform maintenance on your mail box.
  This is very important and one of the best ways to keep the size of the file below 2GB. You may want to perform these maintenance tasks:
  • Throw out your unneeded deleted and sent items monthly or, if you can, weekly.
  • Always delete spam and other unwanted mail as soon as you get it.
  • If you receive email with large attachments, save the attachments to your disk and regularly delete the original email so it is not stored in two places.
• Create a separate PST file.
  To archive mail that you may need in the future, we recommend creating a separate PST file you can export and burn onto a CD or DVD or save to a file server. We do not recommend using the Archive feature in Outlook. Here are simple instructions for creating a separate archive PST file:
  • Move all the folders and email that you want to archive into a new folder.
  • Go to File|Import/Export and export the folder to a PST file.
  • Save the file as a different name such as "Archive_x" where "x" is the date or some other identifier (do not use a period in the archive name).
  • Burn the archive PST file to CD or DVD, or save it to a file server.
  • Once you confirm that the new PST file contains all the archived mail, you can delete the archive folder you created and reduce your PST file size.

If you need to access the archived email, you can load the CD. Then, from the Outlook File menu, you can select Open, choose Outlook Data File, browse to your CD (or file server), select the file, and click open. This gives you access to all the mail you exported to the PST file. This procedure can also be used for jobs or projects that have been completed. You can create as many archive PST files as you want and store them on CD or DVD for as long as you need without taking up space on your computer.

How Big Is Your PST?

To check your PST size, go to File|Folder|Properties. Click the Folder Size button and Outlook will show all the folders and their sizes. You can then calculate your total PST file size. If you are close to 2GB, we recommend following the maintenance and archive steps described above. (As reminder: 2GB = 2,000,000 KB or 2,000 MB.)

*The 2GB limitation exists with all versions of Outlook, except Outlook 2003. If you are using Outlook 2003, the limitation has been removed. We recommend, however, that you perform regular maintenance on your mailbox to keep your email manageable.