Outlook archiving

[David S]

Woody's Office for Mere Mortals in July 2002 carried a tutorial for manually archiving Outlook. It involved creating a new PST file and transferring current data from the old to the new. The basic premise was that the procedure fixed a lot of what ailed Outlook as the PST grew in size.

My question is whether this kind of procedure is still recommended practice or whether there are now better ways to keep Outlook's later versions healthy? (I use Outlook 2010).

[JoeP517]

Many people still use that technique. Mostly for organizational purposes such as keeping all emails in a certain time period. Older versions of Outlook had a hard 2GB size limit for any PST files. With newer versions of Outlook the size of a PST is not an issue as far as stability goes. However, a large PST file can still a performance problem. How large it needs to be to become an issue depends on each individual installation - the CPU being used, the disk drive, RAM, what else is running with Outlook.

The best way to keep Outlook healthy, outside of paying attention to fixes, is to devise a housekeeping regimen that suits your work style & data retention needs. Then stick to it.

Joe