Reduce Outlook mailbox size while keeping email messages and attachments (and access)

Ahmed_Masoud97 "When you create a local pst file, it just copy the items from your main mailbox to your pst file."

My last question was to ask, How do I know it's working? I created the rule on Friday, but there was no evidence Outlook was doing any work when I finished my workday. Now, after several days, there's no evidence Outlook did any work in the background, as the archive is <1k:

    Directory of C:\Users\MyHome\Documents\Outlook Files
    08/19/2024     09:39     271,360     archive-2022-and-older-sent.pst

"After making sure everything is copied, delete them from your main account..."

I'm not cherry picking one email at a time, so there's nothing specific I'm looking for. The method I found for creating a PST gives no stats on what the Archive is doing, or how many items it found, or how many items it completed. How am I to measure the progress or success of the PST archive?

The instructions use `Info > Tools > Archive`, and this has only one filter: "Archive items older than...", So let me try a search. I'll try to manually find emails from before 12/31/2022. (I imagine this would be how I could delete them, also). 

The results say no messages were found (see screen shot #1); however, if I use the GUI and scroll backwards in the Archive folder, I can see emails from 2015! (see screen shot #2).

Again, I ask,

• How do i know its working?
• To your point, how can I measure the success?
• What method can I use to make the same search selection as the manually created PST, to then remove the items?