A Quick Look at Methods to Protect Valuable Outlook Data
If you have been using Outlook for a long time, you probably have a large amount of valuable data stored in the Outlook PST file. Considering that you probably store all your daily emails, important appointments, tasks, project reminders, journals, notes and many other such items, in Outlook, the PST file storing all these items is growing larger and larger with each passing day. However, if you do not immediately attend to the size of the PST file, it is possible that Outlook starts to work less and less efficiently till one day it becomes seriously damaged and completely inaccessible. In such situations, you might have to use sophisticated recovery tools to carry out a PST repair and protect your data.
As prevention is better than worrying about recovery of data, you should start looking at the size of the PST file as soon as you notice any of the following problems.
l If Outlook takes a long time in downloading mails, sending mails or even while starting up, it may indicate that the PST file is proving to be too large for it to manage efficiently.
l You may notice that Outlook is responding very slowly to your commands and that there is a gradual degradation in the performance of the software.
If you do not take immediate steps to bring the size of the PST file under control, very soon the size of your Outlook mailbox file may go beyond the allowed size limit. This will mean you have to take hurried steps to reduce the size of your PST file; worse still, it might end up corrupting the main PST file seriously. The only option left for you then is to use a recovery tool such as Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen to carry out a PST repair and restore the data contained in the file.
If you are a regular Outlook user, it is essential that you clean up Outlook frequently so that you keep the main PST file size under control. This will mean getting rid of all unwanted or duplicate emails. You may surprised at the large number of unwanted mails that you keep in your mailbox including mail-daemon messages, mail delivery failure messages, out-of-office replies, RSS feeds, old newsletters and other types of automated mails. If you have any emails with large attachments, you are better off moving them out of Outlook and storing them in another relevant folder. This alone will help reduce the size of the Outlook PST file by half. Deleting mails merely moves them to the Deleted Items Folder. You might want to remove all the items from the Deleted Items Folders so that they do not appear in the PST file anymore.
Finally, compacting the PST file will ensure that the file is now at the optimum size and that Outlook is able to manage it more efficiently. This will reflect in a smoother running of the application and will avoid situations requiring PST repair for a long time.