Reese wrote:

That's not what my wife tells me, but getting back to the issue at
hand, by Unicode you mean Office 2007 format, right?

Correct.

Wouldn't backups of the current, mega PST be just as well? Why back
up the outdated-format originals when copies of their contents exist
in the modern version?

I'm paranoid. I'm of the opinion that you can never have too many backups.
Sure, a backup of the compined PST should be sufficient, but I don't see
much sense on not keeping the original data as well when it's so cheap to do
so.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]