Moving Outlook Mailboxes
November 28, 2024 10:13 PM Subscribe
My dad, much to my consternation, uses Outlook (16?) on his Windows 11 desktop. The main problem is that when he got his computer, he installed Outlook on his C: drive, which was a small SSD, because he got a 2TB HDD. Now his mailboxes have eaten up all the space left on C, so he's constantly running into "out of disk space" errors.
I do not use Outlook at all, so while I'm nerdy enough to usually figure things out when I look at them, I'm fairly unfamiliar with Outlook's... quirks.
At one point, I went to my parents' place and I spent a couple of hours poking around and researching online and that sort of thing. I thought it might be as simple as moving the mailbox table of contents and mailbox data to the D drive, and everything would be great.
It was not great. It turned into a 10+ hour visit during which the only significant change I was able to make was uninstall some stuff to buy him more time. If I'm remembering correctly, moving the mailboxes to D caused a loss of data as the mailboxes rebuilt (??? It's been a few months, I could be wrong.) and I just couldn't get Outlook to look in the right place at the right mailboxes. After spending the entire day there, I gave up for a time.
I've also tinkered a little remotely, but again, I can't seem to find the solution. I also remember there was something funky about the OST and PST files, though I can't remember what that issue was. I can certainly connect to my dad's computer this weekend and try to revisit that if someone has a suggestion. I'm pretty sure I tried the symlink solution listed here, but it didn't work.
Has anyone had success in performing a move of Outlook mailboxes from one drive to another? I welcome your thoughts. :)
Note: While some of my dad's mail is IMAP and thus resides on the server, one of the accounts he's got is one he's had for the better part of 25 years, if not longer. The associated mailbox has a lot of mail in it and he is adamant he doesn't want to lose it. That mail was collected from a POP server for a long, long time, so no, just downloading everything from the server won't work. (Believe me, I checked!)
I do not use Outlook at all, so while I'm nerdy enough to usually figure things out when I look at them, I'm fairly unfamiliar with Outlook's... quirks.
At one point, I went to my parents' place and I spent a couple of hours poking around and researching online and that sort of thing. I thought it might be as simple as moving the mailbox table of contents and mailbox data to the D drive, and everything would be great.
It was not great. It turned into a 10+ hour visit during which the only significant change I was able to make was uninstall some stuff to buy him more time. If I'm remembering correctly, moving the mailboxes to D caused a loss of data as the mailboxes rebuilt (??? It's been a few months, I could be wrong.) and I just couldn't get Outlook to look in the right place at the right mailboxes. After spending the entire day there, I gave up for a time.
I've also tinkered a little remotely, but again, I can't seem to find the solution. I also remember there was something funky about the OST and PST files, though I can't remember what that issue was. I can certainly connect to my dad's computer this weekend and try to revisit that if someone has a suggestion. I'm pretty sure I tried the symlink solution listed here, but it didn't work.
Has anyone had success in performing a move of Outlook mailboxes from one drive to another? I welcome your thoughts. :)
Note: While some of my dad's mail is IMAP and thus resides on the server, one of the accounts he's got is one he's had for the better part of 25 years, if not longer. The associated mailbox has a lot of mail in it and he is adamant he doesn't want to lose it. That mail was collected from a POP server for a long, long time, so no, just downloading everything from the server won't work. (Believe me, I checked!)
Personally, just copy the default PST file to the drive with more space, then test it with a new email profile and open the copy of PST. If that works, you're golden, and the old one is there as backup.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-and-find-items-in-an-outlook-data-file-pst-2e2b55a4-f681-4b93-90cb-31d39349fb95
posted by kschang at 10:16 AM on November 29 [1 favorite]
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-and-find-items-in-an-outlook-data-file-pst-2e2b55a4-f681-4b93-90cb-31d39349fb95
posted by kschang at 10:16 AM on November 29 [1 favorite]
Even though I use Outlook, I'll defer to those with more expertise about moving your Outlook data files. I will, however recommend that you use Mailstore Home to archive all of your Dad's email prior to attempting the move. Mailstore Home is free, it can archive from many different sorts of email, and restore to them too - allowing, for example, migration from Outlook to Thunderbird. It has good search capabilities that are fast, too. The only downside I've seen is that you can't , within the product, schedule regular archive jobs. There's supposedly a way to do it with Windows task scheduler and a command line with options, but I haven't tried that.
posted by TimHare at 2:04 PM on November 29
posted by TimHare at 2:04 PM on November 29
Also - if you do come up with a concrete set of steps to migrate Outlook files to a different drive, could you post the steps, or a link to them, here?
posted by TimHare at 2:06 PM on November 29 [1 favorite]
posted by TimHare at 2:06 PM on November 29 [1 favorite]
Considering the costs and fussiness, if it is at all possible to just get a big SSD and use that for everything, that’s probably the way to go.
posted by rockindata at 3:49 PM on November 29
posted by rockindata at 3:49 PM on November 29
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Alternatively a new 2tb SSD should only be ~100 USD, and you could clone his existing C drive to a bigger one using something like macrium reflect and replace the C drive.
posted by samj at 11:27 PM on November 28 [3 favorites]