PST files on a network? - NOTWORK
Um, I hate to say this, but even Microsoft have made it clear that accessing PST files within Outlook across a network is an unsupported configuration.
Microsoft Technet Blogs:Network Stored PST files … don’t do it!
and
You don't explicitly say that is what you were doing, but your posting is a bit suggestive:
Outlook .pst files shall be thy instrument of archiving....
Claims the network share upon which the .pst files reside are backed up proved to as hollow as the archive files generated from them.
Of course, if you copied the mail to an Archive PST locally, then shut down Outlook, then copied the closed PST file to the network share, and did not try to access it using Outlook across the network, it would probably (this is Microsoft, after all) be OK. I used to do precisely that, until Corporate IT decided our network share data was getting too big*, and it became allowable to store PSTs locally on IT-issued USB connected encrypted portable disk drives.
*We were allowed only a couple of hundred megabytes of Outlook mailbox each. There was also an email retention policy enforced that acted automatically on mailboxes deleting emails older than a certain age. I successfully pointed out that I needed certain of my emails to be retained for at least the length of customer contracts (which could be multi-year), ending up needing to juggle multiple USB disks (for backup) containing some** contractually useful emails.
**Read 'a lot of'.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
