Thursday, January 11, 2007

The final word about moving PIM.Vol

PIM.Vol is a database used by Pocket Outlook to store data from your Calendar, Contacts, Inbox and tasks. By default, this file is stored in the memory of your device. The more Personal data you store on your PPC/Smartphone, the bigger PIM.Vol grows. There is no other way to circumvent that. If you have something like 500 to 1000 contacts, PIM.Vol will grow in size to accommodate them.
I keep receiving emails or see a lot of posts on the net about moving PIM.Vol to the Storage Card to make more space in memory. Let me tell you why this is not possible:

1. You CANNOT move PIM.Vol to the Storage Card. This is by design. There is no registry tweak that will help, nor any other third party application. All other PIM apps use the default PIM.Vol database.


2. Reading from the storage card is much slower.

If you manage to move PIM.Vol to your storage card, the system will automatically create a new empty one in memory. Meaning that all your data will move along to the Storage card. If you access your contacts, it will be empty. Basically you can move PIM.Vol, but Outlook Mobile will still look in memory for the database.

Hope this little note helps.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have 4000 contacts and pim.vol has grown to 32 Mb... Is there REALLY no solution to use my 2 GB Storage card?

Linley Meslier said...

I'm afraid yes.

Unknown said...

To any one who might be able to help: My screen on my cell phone died and I can't get it to sync with ActiveSync. If I can retrieve pim.vol, is there anyway to get my contact information out of this file so that I can either read it or get it on to a new cell phone that doesn't use window's mobile?

Linley Meslier said...

I doubt that will work. I recommend you simply sync your device with a PC via USB. You will then be able to access your data in Outlook.

Anonymous said...

Find another app to store extra contacts in... guessing you do not call all 4000 contacts every day. Use regular contacts for your main contacts and use another app you can click on to dial less used contacts. Store the other app on your memory card.

Anonymous said...

I have noticed I have a pim.vol and pim1.vol on my device as well as a pim.vol on my storage card. Could this be causing me not to be able to add new contacts? Please help. Thanks in advance. (Running WM6 HTC PPC-6800)

Unknown said...

As an update, my cell phone vendor was able to ActiveSync to my phone with the broken monitor and sync it with his Outlook. Then he was able to email me the pst file, which I could open in my Outlook. Yeah, didn't lose my contacts.

Linley Meslier said...

Bones: There can only be one file and that is PIM.Vol. I don't know what the other two files are.


Geri: That's exactly what I told you to do

Anonymous said...

Is there a program to edit information from PIM.VOL?