In outlook, is it better to have one large outlook data file or multiple small ones

Question

Every few years I create a new Outlook data file for my person info. Most of these files are around 300MB. I wanted to see if this actually makes sense in terms of efficiency, etc.

In outlook, is it better to have multiple personal data files or a single large one? Is there a breakeven point?

Answer 1

Having multiple PST files is a nightmare if you ever move or restore, because you have to go somewhere else to find old emails, and then re-mount your PST files in Outlook, and then you sometimes end up with archive.pst, archive1.pst and are never entirely sure which PST that email you're looking for is in.

Outlook 2010 has a default PST size limit of 50gb; but this can be adjusted. I have a 10Gb PST folder (with 3gb in the inbox and the rest over other folders, and up to 30,000 emails in a single folder) and it's just fine.