I am using a fully patched/updated version of Outlook 2010. At the beginning of each year, I take one year's worth of content out of the outlook.pst file and move it into archive.pst, keeping only five years worth of data in outlook.pst. I do this to speed up searching, etc. Once this is done, I tell Outlook to re-index everything (Options -> Search -> Indexing Options -> Advanced -> Rebuild).





However there are times when I need to search for an old email, so I do this: File -> Open -> Open Outlook data file and select archive.pst. The problem is this, every time I want to search for an email, Outlook tries to re-index everything, which takes hours. Why on earth isn't the index data available? More importantly, are there some changes I can make so that the index data remains available, so that searching for one email doesn't take hours?


Thanks.