Outlook is my favorite application for organizing my To-Do list. Is is very easy to make a tree with folders. Folders can be renamed, deleted, moved, etc. Great. With the “post” facolity you can put any information in it, amd attach any file to it. So not just email meassages. But of course the Outlook folders were designed to in the first place to store email messages. A major fraction of my daily tasks is connected to items having haveing received by email items like requests, reminders, announcements etc.Other applications organizing my To-Do lists are of inferior quality, including the in-built Task in Outlook.
There is however one major drawback, that irritates me daily. The functionality is so good that I still keep on using Outlook for this purpose. What is the problem? The problem is synchronization and size of the pst folders. Folder trees are contained in a pst file. I have typically five to ten pst files. For instance the archive file that I call “2008″. I change theis folder hardly ever, because it is now the year 2009 and this folder contains stored stuff of 2008. Although I do not change the folder I do read it regularly. So it is part of my “active” pst folders and it is availbale any time I use Outlook. The size of this folder is about 300 Mb, the result of a year of sending and receiving email messages with numerous attachments.
Problem
I do not use network drives for three reasons: (i) you have to be on-line, (ii) they are slow, and (iii) networks do go down regularly. So I employ a synchronization utility (BeyondCompare) that copies all my changed data files to a USB-disk. This is acceptably convenient as the disk is fast and light weight. The problem with Outlook is that I always have copy all my pst files, although a major fraction of them has not been changed. But – and this is the problem – any pst files that has been accessed by Outlook gets a new last-modified date. The reason for this time stamping is that in the pst file information is stored how it was shown to the user, even if the user hasnot looked at it. So this information is updated all the time, even if it has not changed. As a result I end up in backing up a 1 GB of pst files that basically have not been changed at all.
Solution
Outlook should be designed to be able to read read-only pst files. And if the user explicitly wants to do something for which the file really has to be changed, the user should be warned and given the opportunity to make the file writable. If this feature would be implemented it would save about 10 minutes per day.
