# Some emails won't archive in Outlook



## jaytechman (Sep 15, 2004)

Running Outlook 2003 SP2. XP Pro.

Outlook.pst grew to almost 1.4 Gig so I selected the Personal Folders folder and did File-Archive and told it to archive everything prior to 1/1/06, including all subfolders, and ignoring those flagged to not be archived. It ran okay and archived "almost" all of the emails/folders, but some emails didn't archive. I can't possibly find a pattern as to why those didn't archive. Some folders that had tons of emails now only have a few from last year left in it, most folders are empty as they should be since it all archived, and some folders have all of their old contents still in them, unarchived. I've tried it a few times, even doing on the individual subfolders, with no change. (I was able to successfully "drag" old emails into the Archive Folders subfolders, though.)

I searched the Microsoft site and found an article about settings you can put in the Registry to limit the size of the Archive.pst file:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925/en-us

But I don't have those entries in the Registry at all (no Office or Outlook under Policies-Microsoft) so I assume it's not in there. I never set them, so they'd have to be there by default if they existed at all.

I've always been told that 2GB is about where XP starts to get unhappy about the size of the Outlook.pst file, so I assume that's the same for the Archive.pst file.

Well, my Outlook.pst is now 800 MB and my Archive.pst file is about 1.4 GB. Maybe that's the problem, since that adds up to over 2 GB. Or is that 2 GB limit for each .pst file?

(It's not related to the fact that the date is based on the last time the email was modified. These emails weren't touched in ages, well before the cutoff date I gave it.)

Maybe I need to restore from backup to prior to all this archiving, and then create separate archive files for each year to keep their sizes down. But then I'd still have the same problem of "cumulative" size. Unless I only "open" one at a time (which would kill my goal of searching all history when I want to).

Maybe I need to use a utility that keeps attachments separate. Any suggestions? (I want to move my Outlook.pst file back and forth between my desktop and my new notebook, so anything I do along those lines needs to take that into account.)

Thanks!


----------



## Richard G Wimer (Dec 30, 2005)

I have not used the archive feature so I know almost nothing about it. So don’t bother to read the rest of this. )

I was wondering about re-naming the file and its extension and moving it to a non-Outlook folder. Then restart Outlook. I think it may create a new archive file. You may have to reinstall MS Office. Then you could test to see if the archive process would work with one or two messages you don't need to save. If that works you would probably know that your original file had reached it maximum size. You then of course can delete your new file and rename and move the old one.

Just some thoughts.

Richard Wimer )


----------



## jaytechman (Sep 15, 2004)

Richard,

Your effort is appreciated.

I took your advice... I stopped reading after the first line. :wink: 

Seriously, I don't see much I can do with your advice. I already know the archive process is working since the better part of a large PST file archived.

Thank you again for the effort to help, though.

Anyone else...?


----------



## yustr (Sep 27, 2004)

I don't use the archive feature. Rather I use "Import/Export" and save the .pst file onto a CD/DVD for truely secure archiving. What I'd be tempted to do is unarchive everything, export everything to a file outside of OL. Then burn it to a DVD. Then I'd go back into OL and delete everything you don't think you'll need. You can always retrieve it from the file or from the DVD if necessary. 

Our experience has been that OL gets screwy if it gets over 1G. MS says it's limit is 20G but I sure wouldn't trust it.


----------



## jaytechman (Sep 15, 2004)

yustr,

Problem would be my wanting to have search ability for all history at my fingertips.

I think you meant "2G."

Thanks.

J


----------



## hatterson (Sep 4, 2008)

I apologize for dragging up an old topic however we are currently having this issue with a client of ours and need to (hopefully) be able to archive all his old email.

I do not know what size his outlook.pst file was prior to the initial archiving as he did that on his own without contacting us (his IT). However when he called us to say that certain emails weren't archiving his outlook.pst was roughly 1.9 gig and his archive.pst was roughly 600MB.

He has many many sub folders (the combined 2.5G of email contains almost no attachments, just plain text) each containing all e-mails related to a specific job. One folder in example contained e-mails from early 2005 until mid 2007. When he archived initially it took the e-mails from that folder from roughly mid 2006 until 2007 and moved them to archive.pst but left the ones from early 2005 to 2006 in the outlook.pst

jaytechman, did you ever figure out why some of your emails wouldn't archive or a solution was to maintain searchability (also important to my client) without having a outlook.pst file that is several gig?


----------

