How to Move the Outlook OST File to Another Drive (Symbolic Link)

On one old laptop the hard drive was split into 2 partitions, and after I connected 3 mailboxes in Outlook and they synchronized, the free space on drive C: ran out very quickly.

The question was how to easily move the mailbox files to drive D:.

Search gave a few options: first, change entries in the registry, and second, make a symbolic link to the file.

I didn’t want to dig into the registry unnecessarily, but I tried it, and it didn’t work quickly and simply. I found many threads about the same problem. In short, that method didn’t look good to me.

So I decided to use my Linux experience with symbolic links. It worked out quickly and neatly.

Step by step

1. Close Outlook.

2. Move the folder with the mailbox files (the main OST and the auxiliary ones, i.e. the whole Outlook folder) to drive D:. You will find it here:

C:\Users\Alex\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook

where Alex is your Windows user name.

3. Name the folder anything or leave it as is. In my example I renamed it to Mail.

4. Open a command prompt as Administrator (right-click cmd.exe or the Start menu entry and choose “Run as administrator”) and run:

mklink /D "C:\Users\Alex\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook" "d:\Mail"

Replace Alex with your user name, d: with the drive you need, and Mail with the name of the Outlook folder you moved from drive C:.

5. Start Outlook. It should continue working from where you closed it — nothing changes for Outlook. On drive C: the mail files no longer take up any space.

I tried to describe the steps in detail so that it is clear even to less experienced users.