Hello! I've noticed a strange thing today when backing up my outlook.pst file in Office 2007. If I choose to export all my Office data (with subfolders included) in a .pst file, the files size is about 33 MB. But if I locate the Outlook.pst manually (the files the Outlook uses), the file size is about 220 MB. Can someone please explain, why the difference? I'm really confused with this. When I was using Office 2003, the backup and the original .pst file sizes were the same. Thanks!

"Office data (with subfolders included) in a .pst file, the files size is about 33 MB". What do you mean by Office data? Are you exporting a folder within Outlook itself? Life's more painless for the brainless.

Hi Jennifer. Well, I'm exporting everything there is from the Outlook to a .pst file with the Import/Export function. Basically, I select the "Personal Folders" (I think it's named this way, since I have a Slovenian version of Office) and check the "include sub folders" window. Anyway, I also think that the amout of emails and attachments can't add up to 220 MB. I don't have that much mail stored in my folders.

This is the soulution I found: Compacting Once you have moved all of the email folders and messages that you wish to archive, you need to "Compact" your main .pst file. This step is important, as Outlook does not automatically shrink the .pst file when you archive data. For example, if you archived out 100 MB of email from a 500 MB Outlook.pst file, the Outlook.pst file will not shrink to 400 MB until you compact the .pst file. This process may take between 5 and 30 minutes to complete, depending on the size of your Outlook.pst file.

Right. Compacting will free up the unused space in the pst file. Importing actually is more labor intensive. You could just copy your pst file or use pfbackup, which is a backup program just for Outlook. It's available as a download from Microsoft's website, and it's free. Life's more painless for the brainless.

Thank you. I will download the pfbackup.