Does OL 2003 waste any space that can be recovered?

B

BudV

I'm using WinXP Home SP2.

The subject says it all. Does the ongoing use of Outlook waste any space
than can be recovered and if so, what utility can we use?
 
N

neo [mvp outlook]

Assuming you are working with a POP3/IMAP account, sure. The personal
folder (.PST) file is kinda like a Microsoft Access database file that ends
up with white space that can be reclaimed over time. You use Outlook's
built-in compact routine. (e.g. Start Outlook, right click on "Personal
Folders" in folder tree and select properties > advanced button > compact
now.) I will warn you that this routine takes a long time to run and
doesn't reclaim all white space.
 
B

BudV

Thanks for your reponse. A couple of questions:

1) Does the compaction actually release the white space back to the
operating system, or does it just keep the allocation for its own
convenience later?

2) Because I recently consolidated two profiles into one, I ended up with
two .pst files with about 110MB each. Is the compaction routine smart
enough to process both of them?

3) How long is "long"?
 
N

neo [mvp outlook]

1) The space reclaimed is hard drive space

2) You would have to do each .PST file.

3) Depends on size of the file and hardware. Just can say that it is about
exciting as watching paint dry. (To give you a real idea, I've compacted a
600MB PST file on a laptop and it takes about 30 minutes.)

To get an idea of what might be reclaimed, I usually do it this way...

1) Start Outlook
2) In Outlook folder tree, right click on Personal Folders and select
properties
3) Select Folder Size button (gives you KBytes in use)

Close Outlook and now use Windows Explorer to see how big the PST file is.
If #'s are within 25% of each other, not worth trying to compact.
 
W

William Lefkovics [MVP]

1) It will shrink the size of the PST file, releasing free space back to the
file system.

2) No, you run it for each PST separately.

3) About that long.

For 110MB each? Not long at all most likely. It can run for 40 minutes or
more here on 5GB PST files. Mileage varies greatly with drive speed,
processor speed, RAM and especially disk fragmentation. You are hurting for
drive space and looking to compact 110MB data files to recover?
 
B

BudV

"LOL" isn't good enough. I literally laughed out loud at your answer to #3.
Thank you. It's good for my health.

Yeah, I'm scraping up whatever pieces I can find because my daughter prefers
working with her 12GB of photos (she has four kids) on the HD, rather than
with the "official" versions stored on the sluggish wireless 256GB external
HD.

Thanks for the answers.
 
B

BudV

Neo,

Thanks for your help. It's always good to get better informed. I noticed
one peculiarity, though, that you might want to comment on.

I have two personal folders. In both cases, the size under Properties was
*greater than* the size shown under Windows Explorer. In one case it was
less than 1%, and in the other it was 5%.
 
N

neo [mvp outlook]

Interesting, the default behavior for data stored into the PST is
compressed/encrypted but I have never seen what you describe.
 
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