ridiculously large outlook archive personal folder

My CFO just came in today saying Outlookwas freezing up on him every time he opened it up. Now I have just been hired so I don't know everything about their practices with archiving but i went in and saw he had 1 large archive file topping out at 19GB!...

So far i have transfered the file(taking 3 hours to do so) to a backup server and I am now able to open up outlook and actually work with it. But what can I do about that large archive file? I would like to split it up maybe by years ie 2001 -20002 etc but whenever i try to do that through outlook it just freezes on me again...does anybody know of any programs that might do the job?

THanks

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dynamik

I think it would be best to split it up a bit. What are the specs on his machine? Maybe it's just running out of resources and a machine with say, more memory, might be able to at least load it up so you can tinker with it.

skrpune

What version of Outlook is it? There are some updates to 2007 that allow for better performance with large ost/pst files (although they were talking more like 2-4GB, not 19).

Aduro

The version is Outlook 2007, fully updated. And yes anytime I try to do anyting through outlook with the file it just freezes everything(when i tried to compress it and trying to split it up).

The system is a old dell inspiron 6000(and I mean old).
HD is 55.8 GB with 1 Gig of ram and a Intel Penium M processor 1.86Ghz

Like I said once i moved the file to someplace where outlook was not looking for it it started running fine. Its just going to be difficult manipulating that large of a file. I found a program called splitpst(Split PST File with PST Splitter Outlook Splitter Tool to Split Large PST Files) that i am going to try.

Paul Boz

Is there a reason why he needs to maintain almost ten years of email?

Aduro

I exaggerated a little on that it’s only a couple of years worth of email. But the reason for it is, that there is defiantly a CYOA mentality since the boss tends for forget orders he tells people and then gets upset at them for doing what was instructed of them. It's their way of making sure they have backups of everything they are told to do and everything they process.

HeroPsycho

might try running scanpst.exe on a copy of it, see if that helps.

tiersten

Temporarily move it to a machine that has more memory and a faster CPU.

qwertyiop

The President of my company had about 9 gigs of emails and it was slowing down his old laptop and taking up alot of space. I ended up making a huge pst of all his emails and then splitting them up into smaller pst's up by project. I then got him a USB flashdrive and copied all the little projects into that so that he can access them only when needed.

petedude

There are repair programs available from third-party vendors for repairing PSTs, but they can be expensive.

I used to tell people to drag E-mails from Outlook into a folder on their C: drive. Creates a file with everything they need, except for some tracking data (anyone know what I'm thinking of?). Such a folder can be backed up, pared down or split up independently of those huge .PST files.

Fugazi1000

I seem to recall a limit of 2GB for PST files and Outlook would corrupt the file by overwriting data once the limit was reached. OSTs are probably bigger but will obviously need NTFS.

Separate folders is one route. A 'proper' archive better still. The likes of Enterprise Vault or a cloud based archive service. If there is business justification (compliance) then local offline mail stores doesn't really cut it. Legal e-discovery is moving up the agenda and the expectation that a business can guarantee disclosure of emails for up to 10 years is growing.

The inverse is also true. A company may have to state that an email no longer exists (and that means nothing in a PST, or a backup tape pr anywhere else). Not an easy task.

Ask bill.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft

qwertyiop

Fugazi1000 wrote: »

I seem to recall a limit of 2GB for PST files and Outlook would corrupt the file by overwriting data once the limit was reached. OSTs are probably bigger but will obviously need NTFS.

Separate folders is one route. A 'proper' archive better still. The likes of Enterprise Vault or a cloud based archive service. If there is business justification (compliance) then local offline mail stores doesn't really cut it. Legal e-discovery is moving up the agenda and the expectation that a business can guarantee disclosure of emails for up to 10 years is growing.

The inverse is also true. A company may have to state that an email no longer exists (and that means nothing in a PST, or a backup tape pr anywhere else). Not an easy task.

Ask bill....

bill gates email netscape - Google Search

I dont know about the size limit but the biggest PST that ive had was about 5 gigs and that was created in Outlook 2003

stonedtrout

Paul Boz wrote: »

Is there a reason why he needs to maintain almost ten years of email?

Ahh.....those can be fighting words, and seen it first hand.

The truth is that much data on a local file you just asking for trouble. Defently make a copy and run scanpst it may take some time though...like a weekend (I suppose it dependins on the computer).

I work for a hosted email company so I live inside outlook.

Check this out How to troubleshoot performance issues in Outlook 2007

Make sure there are not more that 8,000 items in a single folder and also check out 3rd party add-ins they can kill outlook slowly and painfully.

Fugazi1000

qwertyiop wrote: »

I dont know about the size limit but the biggest PST that ive had was about 5 gigs and that was created in Outlook 2003

I think you're right with some caveats.

Repair a 2gb Personal Folders file or Offline Folders

I was certainly thinking of Outlook 2000 and the need to use pst2gb.exe often!

blargoe

You are not going to have much success manipulating this 19GB file over the network unfortunately. And there's a reason why Microsoft recommends never letting them get that big... once they get too big to manage, you might be SOL when crunch time comes and you need to find something in your archive, or it just breaks and gets corrupted.

The only way you're going to be able to do it is using a machine with more CPU and memory, probably. Even then it will take a long time and seem like Outlook is locked up... but you have to just let it run.

stephens316

I agree with the guys, I use to have to back up gigs of HR email just because it is CYA in that department. What you need to do is setup size limts on exchange if your using exchange, or if your not using exchange then you need to setup a GPO with the office Template to limt the size of the PST. PST should never be allowed to go over 2 gig. If you move something more than 2 gig you run the risk of it corrupting.

If you lose his data it might YA, or your manager's or who ever in charge of IT. You should be aware of issues like these and try and prevent them. Now is probably a good time to do an audit of everyone's PST files. So hope things work out for you.