Decrease the Size of Your OST File – Increase the Efficiency of Outlook

If you have been working with Outlook for a reasonable amount of time, it is quite natural that the OST file storing appointments, addresses, emails and other Outlook tasks becomes quite enormous in size. Not only does this start affecting the working of Outlook, it increases the chance of losing a very large amount of data if this main OST file becomes damaged. You are better off reducing the size of the OST file to improve the efficiency of Outlook and to allow for better utilization of space by using the room occupied by deleted items. You can also expect lesser corruption of files and avoid having to take steps towards exchange recovery.

 

The simplest ways of knowing if your OST file needs some attention is when it starts taking a long time to open, download mails or move items around. This degradation in the performance of Outlook should suggest to you that your OST file may be fairly large in size and that you should probably be taking steps to reduce it. Remember, the earlier you take steps to address this issue, the better you will be able to avoid major problems arising in the OST file. By addressing the concerns regarding the size of OST files, you will be able to improve the performance of Outlook and save yourself some time. Else, it is possible that Outlook performance continues to degrade and that at some point, you may have to turn to exchange recovery.

 

To tackle the problem of huge OST files, begin by carefully going through all the items stored in Outlook. Discard all those that you do not need and then empty the Deleted Items folder as well. From the main Tools menu, you can access Account Settings. From here, select Microsoft Exchange Server, go to the Advanced Settings and select Offline Folder File Settings. Select the option of 'Compact Now'. This will enable Outlook to discard all the deleted items, compact the existing items and thus make more space available. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways in which you reduce the size of your Outlook OST file without affecting any of the other remaining items in various folders.

 

Regardless of these steps that you take towards compacting the OST file, there are times when hardware problems and software failures cause corruption in the OST file. It is therefore best that before you start the compaction process, you take proper backups of all the important data in your file. This way, even if there is any damage to the OST file or compaction creates any problem, you will be able to restore your data from the backups. If you have not taken any backup and fear that the OST file is corrupted, then you may have to use a sophisticated exchange recovery mechanism such as Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen. This is one of the most popular OST recovery tools in the market today and will allow you to quickly recover your data from damaged or orphaned OST files.