Compact The Personal Folders (pst) Files In Ms Outlook

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MS Outlook stores all its email communication and other data including appointments, journals, address books etc in PST file. Hence we can deduce that PST files are basically the repository for MS Outlook. Here we will discuss how we can compact the personal folder (.PST) files in Microsoft Outlook to eliminate deleted item space and recover some important space on your hard disk. This also relieves you from the headache to repair outlook file when it corrupts due to surpassing the threshold size limit of the pst file. In order to create some room on your hard disk drive, you can delete unwanted items from your set of PST folders and then compact the files to make them smaller.
When you delete the unwanted items from every PST folder, it only moves them to the Deleted Items folder, which is in the same file. We suggest you to delete items from the Deleted Items folder to permanently delete the data so that MS Outlook can compact the file effectively.
The compacting process does not remove all the free space from the file. It just leaves either 16 kilobytes (KB) or 4 percent of the file size (before compacting), ...
... whichever is greater. However, before you compact the file, make sure the folder meets the following requirement:
File must be 16KB or larger.
File must have at least 16 KB of space freed since the last time it was compacted.
It is important to note here that you can start Outlook file compaction manually, or run it automatically in the background.
Performing automatic background compaction
Personal folders (PST) file that is not saved on your computer system need to go for manual compaction because of interaction between the system where the pst files are stored and your computer. Automatic compaction is preferred by the users as it takes place as an idle task in the background. In order to perform automatic background compaction, following conditions must be true:
3. MS Outlook must be running.
4. Computer must not be engaged in other CPU-intensive tasks such as copying or downloading files.
Starting PST Compaction manually
4. On the File menu, click Data File management.
5. Click the personal folders (.PST) files that you want to compact and then click Settings.
It is important to note for the Windows Vista users that the default path of the PST files is drive:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook. For the Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, the default path of PST files is drive:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.
6. Click Compact Now, click OK and then click Close.
The need of compaction arises when Outlook starts behaving lethargic and acts slow while opening or performing other tasks. In order Repair Outlook File , you need to compact the file to create some space on your hard disk. However, if the pst corrupts due to excess data in your PST file, rely on repair outlook file software to recover your important data.