If you use Microsoft Exchange Server, there's an exception. Then your Outlook folders items, including Message, Calendar, Inbox, Tasks, Sent Items, Outbox, Deleted Items will be delivered to and stored on the server, in the Exchange message store. However Personal Folders can still be utilized to store/file items that you created or moved from the mailbox on the Exchange server to a Personal Folder for future reference.

Think of Personal Folders as virtual filing cabinets that require maintenance and management the same way actual filing cabinets do. If not maintained, then you might end up with multiple "cabinets" in various locations containing out-dated and unnecessary information that's taking up precious, needed space or even worse causing problems.

This seems to be something similar to what Steve Eckert is experiencing with his Personal Folders.

How do I marry all of the different Outlook *.PST files that I seem to have created, and incidentally scattered, while still retaining the full functionality of the relevant contacts and categories that I had previously assigned to the various contacts.

It seems that choosing any one folder results in loss of data or journaling, calendared info or tasks. I have suffered damaging loss of crucial calendar dates and events. I realize that loss of data is probably the wrong word. I have merely misplaced or divorced the relevant info. HELP! Thank you for your assistance.

As we all know, our Personal Folders can become almost impossible to manage -- especially if there are multiple ones involved or if they are too large and performance is being affected. To help with this issue, you may want to combine all of the Personal Folders into one.

However each Personal Folder is really contained in a separate file called a .PST file. The actual .PST files can't be added to or combined together. Instead, you need to import/export the data from one Personal Folder to another within Outlook. Beforehand, I suggest reviewing the items in each of the Personal Folders and deleting anything possible before doing any import/export. If you don't do that, doing an import can push that Personal Folder above the 2GB limit -- causing possible problems. I typically recommend not going over 850MB per Personal Folder due to possible performance issues even though the actual limit is 2GB. [This, of course, relates to pre-Outlook 2003 data format .PSTs, which can actually be substantially larger, although performance issues often do remain. -- DG]