PST Size Unaffected after Archiving or Deleting Emails

The best practice to prevent Outlook PST from corruption, avoid performance issues and conserve hard disk space is to delete unwanted email messages. You can also archive the file, which typically serves as the backup process for your old emails. At times, you observe that though you apply these measures, but the overall PST size remains unaffected. As a result, the problem you were encountering before deleting or archiving the email messages doesn’t fix. The reason for this could that you haven’t compacted the file. However, rather than deleting or archiving the PST contents, you can simply choose Split PST software that split a PST file into several smaller .pst files without any modification to original data.For example, suppose your Outlook PST file reaches approximately to its maximum size value. Consequently, you decide to empty the Deleted Items folder, remove unimportant emails and items and/or archive your PST file. You check the file size and observe that none of these methods have effect on the total file size of PST. The file size stays the same.

Cause

The above behavior occurs when you don’t compact the target PST file. Outlook doesn’t free up the actual space until you compact it.

Solution

You should compact the PST file manually or by running automatic background compaction. The PST to be compacted must be equal to or greater than 16 KB in size value and must have 16 KB of free space since the last compaction.

Background compaction runs automatically once it finds CPU free of other tasks and Outlook running. However, to start the process manually, you should click File | Data File Management and select your PST file. You can then click its Settings | General | Compact Now and click OK.

To reduce the PST file size, one of the easiest method is to Split PST File. This is possible using third-party tools designed to use safe procedures that can split an Outlook PST file. Split PST utilities provide you graphically rich look and advanced options that enable easy file split.

PST File Splitter is a comprehensive tool that splits a large .pst file on the basis of sender’s email ID and date. It is compatible with Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000. It is an advanced Split PST File utility that ensures complete security of your data. The tool is competent to split the file into various small .pst files, each usable directly with Outlook.