My pst file on laptop is too big to backup online. What can I do?

Question

I need to backup my large PST file (10GB) from my laptop to my home PC when I am on the road. I tried copying it to my Google Drive, but it crashes. I tried copying it across a VPN to my home PC but it often stops because of network issues and then has to restart from the beginning again. Is there a better system I can use? I must run my mail with a PST for POP3 and not .ost like with IMAP.

Answer 1

Assuming you have enough space on your Google Drive... You could also consider splitting your PST into multiple smaller PST files, as I believe that Outlook supports multiple PST files. I had a co-worker many years ago who kept a different PST for each year which kept the size of each PST much more manageable than having everything in one huge PST. It also meant that backups of PSTs were much faster as he only needed to keep a continuing live backup of the current year's PST and only needed to refresh the backup the older ones if something changed in those older PST files.

Answer 2

I need to backup my large PST file (10GB) from my laptop to my home PC when I am on the road.

If your Internet connection is not reliable enough, you could use sneakernet:

1. Buy a USB stick.

2. While on the road, backup your PST file to the USB stick.

3. As soon as you are back home, attach the USB stick to your home PC and copy the PST file to your home PC.

Advantage: As an additional bonus, you now have an "air-gapped backup" of your PST. Also, copying the file to a USB stick is (usually) a lot faster than sending it over a VPN.

Disadvantage: As long as you are on the road, it's not an "off-site" backup (yet). If you store the USB stick in your laptop bag and lose the bag, you lose both your laptop and your backup. Consider enabling encryption (e.g. Bitlocker To Go) and storing the USB stick somewhere else (e.g. wallet or coat pocket) instead.

Answer 3

I use rsync for this. As I type this I am away from home with my laptop and every few days I back up about 100GB of data to my desktop PC at home. I do this through a VPN to my home network.

I use the Cygwin version of rsync, but like many unix apps it's complicated to get working. You need to run rsync as a server on your PC then run it as a client on your laptop. A quick Google will find rsync howtos, or alternatively here may be commercial Windows ports that are easier to use. Or if you want to ping me in the chat room I'd be happy to share my scripts for running rsync.

rsync only copies the parts of the file that have changed, and with a large pst file typically only a small part of the file changes from day to day. My (large but not 10GB) pst file copies in a few minutes even when the Internet access is not very fast.

Answer 4

Open your favourite compression program and use the split functionality.

Chunks of 500MB to 1GB should be fine, if the connection does drop out you only lose one chunk so easier to restart and try again.

Answer 5

First thing is to determine if you need to keep everything - are you able to delete old emails, file attachments, etc. to shrink the size down?

Second, tell Outlook to compact the pst file.

Taken from Reduce the size of your mailbox and Outlook Data Files (.pst and .ost):

1. Delete any items that you do not want to keep and empty the Deleted Items folder.
2. Select File > Account Settings > Account Settings.
3. On the Data Files tab, select the data file that you want to compact, and then select Settings.

Note: If you are using an Exchange or Outlook.com email account, you need to additionally select the Advanced tab > Outlook Data File Settings.

4. In the Outlook Data File dialog, select Compact Now and then select OK.

Third - Verify you have enough storage on Google Drive.

To help with transferring, try compressing the pst file - right click the pst file in file manager and choose "send to" -> "Compressed (zipped) folder" - though with files that big, I like to use 7zip and the 7z algorithm.

I don't know if a pst file will compress that much to make it worth while, but worth a shot.

You mentioned network issues - that could also be causing the trouble to upload to google drive.

You can use robocopy with the /z option to transfer files across VPN with resuming capabilities.

In terminal/command prompt:

robocopy "<path_to_folder_where_pst_Is>" "<destination_folder_path>" "my_pstfolder.pst" /Z

Example:

robocopy "d:\myfiles" "\\myworkcomputer\network_shares" "emails.pst" /Z

Is what I would use to copy a file from my PC to another computer on my network. I don't know what the exact path would be for a VPN.

Adding /COMPRESS will use network compression if the destination PC supports SMB compression and if files can be compressed.

Answer 6

10GB are achievable (normally) only throughout several years. The smartest thing to do is to split the file in several files, one per year (already answered by others here).

All PAST e-mails are in these PST files.

ADDITIONALLY, you will have 2 working files:

1. A longer term storage file - to be used for the current year, for storing older e-mails. It grows only as a result of manual back-up, or regularly, but NOT for each e-mail. Each day? Each week? It gets freezed at the end of each year.
2. A short term storage file - to be used for the fresh e-mails. Every new e-mail goes here. This is regularly "emptied" into the previous file.

Why this setup? You have all e-mails accessible. The longer term storage will not get corrupted if you lose connection for any reason. if you lose something, you lose just a small amount.

For added protection, configure the POP3 account (if at all possible in your case / company) to NOT delete the e-mails from the server after the first download. In this way, you can read the same e-mail both at home and at work. of course, you will need to empty the server storage regularly. Manually, or with some automated rule.

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A possible, elegant solution, is to transfer the file by torrents, if allowed. It might be slower than flash-drive or portable hard-drive / SSD, but the result is guaranteed to be OK. Obviously, you will not share the torrent file with anyone, and you will stop the sharing after the job is done.