Moving an imap data file to a different drive

Tech Talk Software
1

Hi everyone I have a laptop with two drives. My C drive is very full. I’d like to redirect my imap data file (I’m using Outlook 365 on a Windows 10 laptop) to my D drive. The imap account is a personal domain email account hosted by Fastmail.

My computer won’t seem to let me do this. I’ve searched YouTube and google for answers but haven’t found anything that works yet. Any suggestions other than buying a new computer (the current one is six years old)?

Thanks

Jeremy

2

Found this video guide after a quick Bing search: How to move an Outlook pst file - YouTube

I haven’t messed with the IMAP protocol in forever, but I believe one of the benefits of this protocol is that mail isn’t stored locally. How large is your PST file? It may not be worth it if mail isn’t being stored offline and it’s small.

3

Thanks for the video. It explains how to move a PST file. I’m trying to move an OST file. In the control panel, the mail settings greys out the browse button that’s supposed to let me browse to a different path.

It’s my understanding (though I could be wrong) that imap is supposed to mirror the email structure on each device it’s configured on. So it downloads copies of everything to each device. I don’t know the size of the file off hand, but it must be pretty big since I have emails dating back to 2004! That’s why I want to move it to my larger secondary drive.

If I can’t move it, I will probably just return to using the Fastmail web based email.

4

You will possibly need to move your whole profile to another drive (move c:\Users\username and all its sub directories).

I did this on my Windows PC, when I first got it. Moving it after the fact is more onerous.

Here are a couple of links I found:

5

I did this before but I can’t remember exactly how I did it. I think I used this guide which seems to fir your issue : Cannot change the location of .ost file - Outlook | Microsoft Learn

6

Thank you all for your help! I was able to juggle some things between my two drives and clean up temp files and old programs. So now I have 30 GB free on my C drive. So I no longer need to move my OST file thankfully!