How to Surmount the Issue of Outlook Corruption Caused Due to File Oversize

Outlook PST files are pool of sensitive data containing important user messages, contacts, notes, calendar appointments, journals, and tasks. There are several risks involved when dealing with these critical data files. These files are used to store Exchange mailbox data locally on each individual user’s workstation. They contain archived items and ensure off-line availability of these items. This helps to unload data from the mail server and free up some store space. As they are stored locally, they have higher propensity to get corrupt. This happens if the hard drives develop bad sectors, one of your software applications malfunctioned, or your system is infected with malware. This may leave you in a crippling situation of data loss. In such circumstances, you should perform PST recovery through advanced third-party software.

One of the most tormenting problems faced by Outlook users is oversizing of the PST file. MS Outlook 2002 and earlier versions impose a fixed size limit of 2 GB on the PST file. If your PST file exceeds this size limit, it becomes susceptible to corruption. This is due to the ANSI format used by earlier versions of MS Outlook. Outlook 2003 and later use UNICODE-formatted PST files that can expand up to 20 GB without facing any corruption risks.

 You may encounter the following error when your Outlook PST becomes oversized:

 ‘The file xxxx.pst has reached its maximum size. To reduce the amount of data in this file, select some items that you no longer need, then permanently (shift + del) delete them.‘

 This is usually accompanied by erratic Outlook behavior, such as inability to move messages from one folder to another, application becoming slow and unresponsive, etc.

In order to prevent this from happening in the first place, you can try splitting the large-sized PST into several smaller PST files and use them independently to access your email messages. If your PST file is corrupt, you can seek professional third-party software to perform outlook recovery. These competent tools safely fix corruption in your PST file to recover your valuable emails, contacts, notes, calendar appointments, journals, etc. They can recover all your mail items intact without disturbing their original formatting. With the help of these tools, you can choose the desired items for recovery and save them at a user-specified location. Further, these utilities support all latest Outlook versions, including MS Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000.