Effective methods of PST Size Reduction

Microsoft Outlook PST file grows rapidly, as users in an organization send and receive emails and perform any other activity in their MS Outlook application. Since the PST folders reside on individual workstations instead of a network server, they often present various business risks and management challenges.

You might have heard and even experienced that PST files are more prone to corruption when their size increases. Since PST files comprise business critical data, their corruption may result in horrible loss to business. Think of your case when you lose an important email, and want it back at the earliest; now imagine the same thing at higher level where data of a number of users is gone; it's not less than a disaster.

As of now, it is well understood that PST file is a culprit, particularly, when it comes to its size limit. Microsoft has offered varying PST file size limits in different Outlook versions, such as:

Ø  MS Outlook 2002 and older versions: 2 GB

Ø  MS Outlook 2003 & 2007: 20 GB

Ø  MS Outlook 2010 & 2013: 50 GB

The later Outlook versions admittedly allow large PST size limit; however, data grows each day, and hence does not find the size sufficient. Well, it is out of your league to increase PST size, of course! But it is good to follow some instructions and consider recommendations to prevent PST from corruption. At the very first, it is the easiest thing to remove all items that are no longer useful. When you delete an item, it goes to 'Deleted Items' folder, and even if it is removed from this folder, its occupied space remains as it is in PST file.

It is a general consideration that removing items from 'Deleted Items' folder results in permanent deletion and minimized PST size. However, in fact, you need to compact PST file to reclaim or free the space occupied by the deleted item, and this is where the method of compaction turns out to be outstanding. There is a 'compact' feature in Outlook that you can use to perform the operation; however, it imposes some limitations, and hence you might not be able to perform compaction if out of scope.

Therefore, it is better to use a compact PST software application that will ease the task and perform it in short time duration without any impractical limitations. With the software, you can easily avoid PST corruption that occurs due to its size limit.