Can .pst file be located in Onedrive?

Without my own intention my .pst was installed in the OneDrive folder in my desktop and it worked normally. Because I did not note that never tryied to access the file from another pc. Due to OneDrive advised about limit of space to 5 Gb I had to delete some files and found the .pst one. Now I moved it but always worked.

I too have been a loyal Microsoft user since the days of DOS and audio cassette backups. I just read through this thread thinking that by now this issue would be solved. Hard to believe that it's not. I'm not in the market for a new computer, but when that day comes, I'll have to look into a MAC. PS - MCSE here...

ColorfulCow:  The method you  describe is the correct one, and it is the way to resolve the problem with your email messages.  Except that I also stopped the group where the email account was from synching. That´s what I did myself.  However, The problem is that this method only handles the email messages.  It doesn´t handle the issue of Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, and Notes.  Those four sets of things continue to stay in the .pst file, and , if your goal was to handle all of the above, it doesn´t resolve the whole problem.  So, if that was your goal, you would be back to -almost- square one.

As I think I mentioned in an earlier message here in this thread, after months, if not years, of trying to figure out how to resolve this problem, I did resolve it by moving to a Mac.  Now, everything is automagically synchronized among all my devices.  It took me a long time to gather the courage to do it, because I have been a PC and Windows user since 1983, when I started using my first IBM XT with a 10MB hard drive.  And after many decades of being a Microsoft/Windows user, my whole life was in the Windows environment.  Well, I did it about six months ago, and it was easier than I thought.  I must say that I am very glad I did the move, and I doubt that I will ever go back to Windows.

I am a little puzzled as to what the problem is.

This is what I did when I was dealing with a similar problem. I am not an expert but this worked fine for me.

1. change the settings of your pop account so that it is no longer able to download any emails from the server (without deleting the POP account), so delete POP server addresses etc.;
2. create a new IMAP account for Gmail in Outlook (inbox should be almost empty as most emails would already have been downloaded into the POP account and then  presumably deleted from the Gmail server)
3. manually drag email folders within Outlook from the inactive POP account into the new (IMAP) inbox. You obviously only need to do this once.
4. when done and comfortable you can remove your POP account

This will move your old POP folders to your new IMAP inbox and will then sync all these folders across all IMAP devices.

At no point do you need to look at your pst file paths etc. Everything is done from Outlook. You just need to make sure that your IMAP inbox is large enough to accommodate the folders and emails that you need when on the road. In my case, I keep very old emails in a separate pst file on one of my computers (I could probably store this in OneDrive if I wanted to, but have not tried this; multiple device access might corrupt the file I imagine). All this year's emails are in subfolders in my IMAP inbox and synced across all my devices.

Am I missing something?

GREAT thread here. Let's take this up a notch.... :-) . So first, some “cloud storage 101” basics….

I think this boils down basically to using a block storage versus object storage system, doesn't it? All of the free cloud storage systems, that general consumers are aware of, are "object storage" systems (Box, Dropbox, One Drive, Google Drive,...). When a change is made to the "object" the entire object (in this case a pst file) must be re-written, not just the part you change inside the file. Object storage is GREAT for storing things that don't change much if ever (photo's, music, etc).

Block storage on the other hand, provides fixed-sized raw storage capacity. Each storage volume can be treated as an independent disk drive and controlled by an external server operating system. This block device can be mounted by the guest operating system as if it were a physical disk and is usually pretty good for databases and things in which a file is “opened” and only part of it is modified when a change is made.

However, Amazon AWS offers a free tier of block storage in their S3 and EBS services (at least for a year?). S3 offers 5GB free and EBS offers 30GB free (you do need to provide a credit card to sign up). The only problem with block storage service is that you need to connect it to a virtual server within the cloud providers network which is not free (please correct me on this if someone is otherwise aware). The good news is that the storage is persistent and does not go away or get erased when it is not connected to a virtual server. I did price out the cheapest 24x7 virtual server at $0.015/hour, or basically $10.95 a month if you left it up and running non-stop. It would be significantly less than that if it was used a few hours a day, along with the storage. The service may start charging for the storage after year 1 as well.

So my question is, is it reasonably feasible to use an Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute block storage service to permanently load your PST files on, and use them remotely from multiple PC’s (albeit one at a time)? It still remains a discussion as to whether this would make sense cost-wise.