Obviously, as time goes by, this file too keeps increasing in size. The problem is the larger the PST file, the more time Outlook takes in doing various tasks, including downloading and opening up emails. It is therefore very important that you keep the size of the main PST data file fairly small so that it is manageable and Outlook can function smoothly. You could always enable Outlook to AutoArchive or you could manually divide the email messages between several PST files so that the main PST file that you use every day, stays small.
In order to create an archive of old and unwanted messages, go to the main menu in Outlook and select File -> Data Management and click on ‘Add…’ Now proceed to ‘Office Outlook Personal Folders File (.pst)’. Name this folder appropriately. If you are archiving your email messages every six months or so, it may be a good idea to name the file by the period in which you have sent or received those emails. You could choose the archive period depending on how often and how many big emails you receive. Just bear in mind that you need to keep the size of the resulting PST file around one or two GB since anything larger will not prove efficient.
To start moving messages or other items to the newly created folder, you could simply drag and drop entire folders to this new folder. If you have already created an ‘Archive’ folder where you have moved all old mail, you could simply select it, drag and drop it into the new archive file. If you have not sorted your mail or other items in any manner so far and would like to move mail before a certain date to your new archive file, you could follow these steps. Go to the main menu in Outlook and select File -> Archive. In the window that appears, highlight the folder that you want sorted. Specify the date, emails sent prior to which will be moved to the newly created Archive PST file. Use the ‘Browse…’ feature to select this PST file and to carry out the transfer.
You could use the AutoArchive feature of Outlook to reduce the size of your main Outlook PST file. If any of your files, including the main PST file or other archived such files get damaged, you can use Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen for quick PST recovery. You can recover very large files and split the output PST files into more manageable files using the PST recovery feature of Advanced Outlook Repair.
You can thus keep Outlook working smoothly and without errors using the Archive feature and with the help of Advanced Outlook Repair.
More information about Advanced Outlook Repair can be found at http://www.datanumen.com/aor/index.htm