How Timely PST Archiving Can Help Avoid Damage to the Files
With Microsoft Outlook offering ease of use and great flexibility, users normally use this great personal management software to manage their email accounts, appointments, address books, journals, notes, projects and much more. Outlook typically stores all these items in Personal Storage Tables (PST files). However, what customers do not realize is that as they keep storing various items, the size of the PST file keeps increasing. This has not only affects the performance of Outlook adversely as it needs to handle a larger PST file, but there is also a real danger of the PST file becoming corrupted. If the PST file becomes damaged because of the increase in size, you might have to consider various Outlook repair tools to fix the PST file.
If you are working with Outlook versions from 97 to 2002, you have to keep in mind that there is a very strict limit on the size of the PST file. A PST file cannot grow more than 2 GB in size for these versions of Outlook. If it does, not only does the file become inaccessible to Outlook but there is every chance that the file becomes corrupted. To deal with an oversized PST file, one may have to first use an Outlook tool to crop the PST file to under 2 GB, which may of course result in some loss of data. You will then have to use another Outlook repair tool ' the Inbox Repair Tool - to actually repair the PST file.
The best solution is of course to keep your PST file well within the size limit of 2 GB by regularly deleting unwanted items and then archiving the old items. This will allow Outlook to manage the PST file better, improve its performance and also avoid the risk of the PST file becoming corrupted. In order to carry out the archive process, you should first go through the items stored in your Outlook folders and delete permanently all those items that you do not need. After this you can either use the manual or automated archiving option to make better use of the space that has been cleared.
Obviously, if you use the manual PST archiving method, you need to manually select the folders that you would like archived and repeat the process on a regular basis. If you choose the automated PST archiving method, you can simply indicate the folders that are to be archived, specify how often you would like the folders to be archived and leave it to Outlook to carry out the archiving.
However, if you have already allowed your PST file to grow beyond 2 GB and fear that it has become corrupted, you might have to use more powerful Outlook repair tools to ensure that you do not lose any data from the PST files. Tools such as Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen can deal with PST files that even run into terabytes and can very easily recover all your data from corrupted PST files.