Exporting a PST in MS Outlook - progress bar looping

Question

I'm exporting a PST file in MS Outlook on Windows XP. It's writing the .pst out to the correct location, and the progress bar is indicating how long left. However as soon as the progress bar gets to the end, it starts again from the beginning. Is this normal? If so, how many iterations can I expect before it finishes?

Solution

This is not normal behavior for a progress bar, but it is "normal" behavior for Outlook. Bottom line is that the progress bar in Outlook serves only to tell you Outlook is working. If the number of times it loops has any relation to any folder structure at all, I've not discovered it yet, and I've been using Outlook since 1993. It will loop even when exporting a single folder.

Comments

[Admin]

hi - am only exporting the inbox. And the progress bar is only displaying "Inbox" each time

[Zeeshan Younis]

@Don Diego is correct. If there are many (>10,000?) of messages being transferred, the progress bar will loop multiple times before completing. One interesting observation is that Outlook will only update its unread message counts after each loop of the progress bar. This lets you compare the unread counts of the source vs. destination folders to gauge how much is remaining in the overall operation.