Okay, let's talk a little bit about data storage. So Outlook data files are used to store your email messages, your calendars, your contacts, all that sort of thing. And there's two types, and the type of file that's used for the storage depends on the type of email address you've got. So if you've got a POP3 account, for instance, then that means that you are being provided your email address by your internet service provider. And you physically, when you connect your emails, you physically download them from the ISP server onto your computer, okay? And that basically means then that they're not physically stored on the ISP server at all, they're just stored in these PST files. Okay, so let's think then, what does that mean? That means that if you get a new computer and you install Outlook, there's gonna be no direct connection to your emails. So you'd have to physically transfer all your PST files from one computer, from your old computer to your new computer. The only emails that will actually connect naturally are tho those you have not physically downloaded yet from the ISP. So that's different to things like Gmail, okay? Gmail is IMAP, and also you've got things, outlook.com, these are exchange accounts and these use something different. They use something called an offline storage table, an OST file. And these use copies so that means you've got a copy of the email from the IMAP, being stored in the OST files on your computer. And what this means is that you're actually able to read your emails, look at your calendar, write emails, et cetera, while you're offline. And you may have been frustrated in the past when you wanted to write, I don't know, maybe write an email at the airport or something, and you're in an airplane mode zone. And you go into Google and obviously, you can't access Google 'cause you're offline. Well, with Outlook, you're gonna have a copy of all your folders and emails that are stored on Gmail, okay? So that's fine, you can actually write email messages. And then what happens is when you go back online it will synchronize automatically. And that means that your folders on Gmail, the live version and your Outlook, will then match up properly, okay? So it's worth understanding that, okay? It's just worth understanding that. So when we think about the storage, then let's just have a look at kind of how, where it's stored, where these data files are. Now, you can do this in a couple of ways, okay? You can either just right click on an email address and go to Data File Properties, okay? And then if you click on Advanced, it tells you your Outlook data file settings. And I dunno if you can see that or not, but you'll see that this is a .OST file. If you wanna see all of them at the same time, you can go to the file menu, which takes you to the backend, and you can click on Account Settings, and you can click on Manage Profiles, and you can click on Data Files. And this will show you all the data files for all your email addresses. So you can see that we've got an OST file for each of them, okay? And then it tells you where they're all stored. So that's quite handy to understand as well. But what you'll also notice, when you're looking at this view, which is pretty cool actually, you can sort of see how much storage you've got. So for Microsoft Exchange, your outlook.com email addresses, it's given us like 15 gigabytes, okay? For Gmail, it doesn't give us any kind of storage and that sort of implies that Gmail is infinite. But it's not actually, Gmail controls the amount of storage you've got available, okay? So it's kind of between you and them. Outlook just kind of syncs to it, okay? And remember, Outlook isn't storing it directly on an Outlook server, it's storing it physically on your computer. So it doesn't hurt Microsoft in any way, shape or form. Whereas, with an outlook.com email, then actually the storage does actually matter because it's being stored physically on Microsoft servers, in that particular case. So with this in mind, you may need to control the number of files in your mailbox, okay? And we can control that with archiving, and that's something I'll show you, later on, in a separate video.
