How To Compress Pst Files In Ms Outlook 2000?

By Author: Merge Tool
Total Articles: 35
Comment this article

Compressing an Outlook PST file means to eliminate deleted item space or unused or extra space from PST file and as a result PST file size gets reduced to a large extent. In this article we would be learning how to compact and compress PST file (Personal Folders file) in MS Outlook.

One of the main reasons for compressing PST file is to conserve space on computer's hard disk. Thereby, you can delete unwanted items from the various PST folders and then compact the files to make them smaller. But simply deleting the unwanted email items from each folder only moves them to the Deleted Items folder, which is in the same file. Nothing constructive comes out from this.

You need delete the items from the ‘Deleted Items' folder to permanently delete them, so that Outlook can compact the file. It is to be noted that the compacting process does not remove all the free space from the file. It leaves either 16 kilobytes (KB) or 4 percent of the file size (before compacting) whichever is greater. Also, to compress PST file, a PST file must meet the following ...
... requirements:

1.The file must be 16 KB or larger.
2.The file must have at least 16 KB of space freed since the last time it was compacted.

There are two ways to compact or compress PST file. You can do it so either manually or automatically. Let's have a look at both of them.

Automatic Background Compaction
PST files that are not on your computer may require manual compaction, due to interactions between the computer where the PST files are stored and your computer.
Automatic compaction takes place as an idle task in the background. The following conditions must be true for this background task to take place:

1.Outlook must be running.
2.The computer must not be engaged in other CPU-intensive tasks such as copying or downloading files.
Manually compressing PST file
1.If the Folder List is not showing, click Folder List on the View menu.
2.Right-click one of the Personal Folders.
3.Click Properties For Personal Folders.
4.On the General tab, click Advanced, and then click Compact Now.
5.Click OK twice.

This whole process of compressing Outlook PST file looks to be quite clumsy. Won't it be better to have software that simply requires selecting PST file that is to be compact? Well, this is possible with PST compress software, which aims at removing extra space from PST file and compress PST in the end. User can compress multiple PST files at once. Software also has the provision of removing the attachments from PST file and extracting & shrinking the attachments to new folder too.

Author of the article has expertise in the field of Data Recovery Software, email recovery, email migration, hard drive recovery, outlook tools and password recovery. He enjoys writing innovative and technology-based articles on various topics related to compress pst, openoffice recovery, bkf recovery, pst split .