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Repair Broken Personal Folders in Outlook
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 7:40 AM on March 7, 2008
A slow or error-prone Outlook might mean your Personal Folders—the place where all your appointments, messages, and other data are kept—are corrupt and in need of some fixin'. The How-To Geek shows you the ins and outs of using a built-in Outlook tool to back up and repair your data, and hopefully get Outlook moving a little swifter once again. The Geek's tutorial should work for most any running version of Outlook. For a backup-only solution, try another free Microsoft tool.
Tags: how to | outlook | outlook tip | repair
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
Bill Clark
Posted 2:52 AM 7/3/08
@aviL: The 2GB filesize limit was true of Office 2000 and previous. With a service pack to Office 2000, Microsoft put in a block that stopped Outlook from writing more than 1.8GB to the file to prevent corruption when the file hits 2GB. When Office 2003 came out, it also came with a new .PST format, which supports Unicode data, as well as a 20GB max file size.
Bill Clark
aviL
Posted 2:52 AM 7/3/08
This is common when .pst's go over their max size of 1.8gb (at least for versions predating 2007 i believe). Regardless, my rule of thumb is to stop adding to the .pst after 1.5gb to stay on the safe side.
Also, keep in mind that often times scanpst will need to 'cut off' some part of the pst file so it's not always a perfect solution- just one that will most likely help you get (some, maybe not all) your data back.
aviL
dermartin
Posted 6:31 AM 7/3/08
another fine tool for outlook ist OLfix 1.6 ([www.heise.de]). if you have problems to start outlook, clear your search folders, repair your .pst file or what else. verry nice, freeware, but only in german... sorry :)
dermartin
jasonleduc
Posted 1:09 PM 7/3/08
Wow! I wish I had a broken Personal Folder to test this, but if it works I will be thrilled.
I can't tell you how many times (in the past) I have had to be the bearer of bad news to someone with a bad Personal Folder.
jasonleduc
SpudDude
Posted 7:55 AM 16/3/08
This story appeared just as a .pst went South. Great timing!
I followed the steps and it worked like a charm.
Thanks LifeHacker!
SpudDude