PST problems

The_Conductor

Looking for a little advice......

I keep getting errors in my PST home directory when using Outlook 2000.
Its reached the stage that I have about 15 recovered folders- where I can view recovered mail, but not interact with it.

Errors occur when my PC crashes with Outlook open (I tend to use my computer for compiling video and a lot of other things, and could be doing quite a few things simultaneously, so its not that unusual for it to either crash, spontaneously reboot, or simply freeze).

I move e-mail from my inbox to seperate PST files several times a day after I've sorted the spam out of it (would get between 120-150 e-mails on an average day (I've had the same e-mail alias since 1990, don't ask.....)

I have rebuilt my home directory from scratch numerous times, and it does get repaired with the repair utility- but I'm more than a bit fed up.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to a route of stabilising my PST files so that they do not sustain damage like this?

Re: backups- I backup all my data to CD on a weekly basis, and mirror it on an array in real time- so data loss is not normally an issue (apart from the most recent couple of e-mails).

Is it time to dump Outlook and move elsewhere? Is there anything else capable of handling large pst archives (I'd rather not have to export 16 years worth of e-mail into other formats if at all possible.....) Open Office?

Simple looking for suggestions- willing to try things out- just a tad fed-up and annoyed.

Shane

JDxtra

I'm guessing your PST files are stored on your local hard drive? (c: or whatever?).

Outlook normally maintains an open lock on your PST file while it's open. I'm guessing it's either one of three things here...

1) Your PC hard drive is so busy while compiling video that Outlook cannot gain write access to the PST file.

2) Your hard drive could be faulty or on it's way out. I'd suggest trying to rule out any hard drive faults first so it's out of the equation.

3) How big is your archive by the way? I believe there is a physical file size limit of 2Gb. If it goes over this size it will become corrupt.

Capt'n Midnight

The 2GB limit applies to versions before 2003 and to recover the file you have to nibble 20KB bits off the end till it drops back to 1940MB or something. (if you are on fat 32 then a 4GB limit applies to all files even if they are outlook 2003)

You could autoarchive every day - so you have a live pst for today and the rest in another pst so hopefully the live one is so small it doesn't hang when saving etc.

http://www.slipstick.com/problems/scanpst.htm - using scanpst to repair pst's
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088/EN-US/ M$ tool to truncate pst's

I don't know if any pst issues were solved with service pack 3 for office 2000

The_Conductor

Thanks for the tips.

I've actually a series of PSTs- sorted by topic and subject matter, on a seperate HDD, formatted in NTFS and with a maximum size of 238Mb (i.e. as much as can be squashed on a zip disk- which used to be an old archive method of mine- my current archiving method is RAID mirroring).

The main outlook.pst file- which is subsorted by both rules and by hand several times a day- has a total size of less than 10Mb (and most of its contents are my address book- which is also backed up as a csv file itself).

I don't think I'm even close to hitting file limits.

I have O2kSP3 installed, but it hasn't made any real changes to this regular occurence.

Hmmmmm......

seamus

Probably something you've thought of - but when you're checking the size of the .pst, are you viewing it through Windows Explorer or using the "Folder Size" utility in Outlook.

Outlook is deceptive in that it may say a folder's total size is 10Mb, but the size of the actual file may be many multiples of that. Outlook doesn't automatically compress PSTs, so it'll continue to grow in size regardless of how much you've deleted from it. I've seen completely empty PSTs, 1.5GB in size. You can use the "compact" utility to reduce it to its actual size, but it's painfully slow on large folders. Around 20-30MB per minute. If the file is > 500MB I've found it quicker to just create a new personal folder, move all the mail over and delete the original.