When you use a modern Solid State Disk (SSD), you probably will notice it a lot later. This is especially true when you do not sort that folder by date either. With slower “green” hard disks (HDD) or when you store a considerable amount of items within a single folder (like 20,000 or more), you might notice this performance degradation sooner. When you are still using Outlook 2003, you might notice it at 4GB already. When you are using Outlook 2007 SP1 or later on an average computer that is less than 4 years old, noticeable performance degradation usually starts at around 12GB. Obviously, the technical limit is (currently) anything but workable so no wonder the Outlook Team had set a limitation on how large a pst-file or ost-file can grow. Unless you are still using pst-files which were created in Outlook 2002/XP or previous, it is unlikely that your pst-file is still in the ANSI format, but it never hurts to check whether your pst-file is in the Unicode or ANSI format. The 2GB limit applies to ANSI formatted pst- and ost-files. However, the technical limit lies at 4194304GB (which is 4096TB or 4PB) and the default limit can be adjusted. Which maximum pst-file size would you recommend?īy default, a Unicode pst-file or ost-file can grow as large as 20GB in Outlook 2007 and 50GB in Outlook 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 and Office 365. Obviously, I do not want to run into issues but I prefer to keep my mailbox in a single pst-file rather than to create many little ones.

My guess is that the difference is a technical limit versus a recommended limit.Ĭurrently, my pst-file is reaching the 2GB and I wonder what I should do. I heard that pst-files can grow as large as 50GB in size but also heard that issues will occur when it grows beyond 2GB.

Outlook 2010 exchange 2019