I did this a year or so ago, and now my .pst file is almost at 7GB, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

My .pst has grown and grown and grown. Click picture for a larger image.

Of course, since it got to 7GB in a relatively short time, I figure I've only got a year or so to go before I've got to find a new solution. At that time, I'm likely to go wild with Mike's Attachment Save to reduce my .pst size. Actually, as I write this, I'm thinking about how much a pain it is to do backups of my .pst file -- it might be worth taking a run at Attachment Save earlier. Stay tuned, perhaps we'll have a review one of these days.

Recap
So, let's recap some of our .pst lessons:

• If you're running an Outlook before Outlook 2003, make sure your .pst file stays way below 2GB.
• You can have bigger .pst files using Outlook 2003, but you'll need to hand-move your folders.
• If you go for a larger Outlook 2003 .pst file, make sure you're running NTFS.
• If you want to reduce your file size even more, consider Mike's Attachment Save to suck out all the attachments from the .pst file.

And there you go, more big .pst thoughts for the week.

Brenda Coxe is a freelance writer from Newark, Delaware. She started writing in high school and has been doing it full time for the past 1-1/2 years.