How to reduce a PST file size?

[Bernd]

Hi,

Someone help me please with the following: my PST file is growing every day. I have deleted some emails and also cleaned the folders called "Deleted Items" but Outlook PST file was not reduced in size. How I may reduce the PST file size? Thank's!

[IT-Guy]

Hi,

When you deleting emails or other items they remain in the same place. Outlook just mark them with the "deleted" flag. You may run the "Compaction" procedure to reduce the size of your *.pst file. After that all previously deleted records will gone for a while, so be careful.

Here is what you need to do:

1. Right click to the topmost record in your Outlook folders tree (it ithe name of your data file)
2. Click "Data File Properties..."
3. Click "Advanced..." button
4. Click "Compact Now" button

That's it. What for the end of procedure and check the size of your *.pst data file.
If it was newer optimized like this, you will see how well the *.pst file size was reduced.

P.S. It is good to do the compaction before creating of the pst backup.

[Bradley]

Great! Thank you for this tip. I used it now and found that my PST file was reduced from 12Gb to 5Gb. Very useful option. Now I am wondering how to find Outlook emails which occupying the most space. I will prefer to deleted some of my large emails with attachments. Do you know the best way to do so? I tried to sort emails in each folder by the Size value however it is not so convenient as I have a lot of folders to check this way.

[IT-Guy]

You are welcome. I see that you have created the separate topic, so I will reply there...

[Chris]

Thanks a lot for this tip. I was looking into this the other day and could find zero answers by googling it. Definitely a very useful option to know about and use.