Eliminating PST files: Part 1 of a series

Last week I gave a webinar on PST file consolidation.  Most people are aware of what PST files are as we all have been using them daily since we started to use Exchange and Outlook (or the Exchange Client in the earlier versions of Exchange).   This is the first post in a series that will discuss the history of PST files, the risks of PST files and how to get rid of them from your organization.

Archiving goes hand in hand with trying to get the rest of the messaging data under centralized management.  We are starting to get to almost 15 years since the first version of Exchange Server (4.0) was released and many things that we have available in Exchange we take for granted.  The earliest versions of Exchange had very limited storage capabilities (Standard Edition only 16GB and while the Enterprise version could theoretically go to 16TB .. 100GB was the practical limit).

Also .. there was no offline access available like the OST files .. so people were encouraged to leverage PST files to make data available offline which also helped keeping mailboxes within strict mailbox limits.  You were king if your administrator gave you 10MB of mailbox storage in the mid 90s.  But in case you don’t know .. what are PST files exactly?

PST is actually an acronym that stands for Personal Folder Storage and its referred to as PST file due to the file extension of the file.  The file usually is stored in the users  profile directory in  Documents and Settings > User > Microsoft > Outlook, however since end users control the creation location of the PST files they could be stored any where where the end user has access to.

There are two different versions of PST files available.  The current version, also known as the unicode PST file became available with Office 2003 and the first version of the PST file.  The difference is that the first generation PST file has a 2GB usable limit and the unicoded file has a theoretical 32TB file size limit.  In the real world .. the unicode PST file will cause performance degradation around 5-8GB in file size.

Why did PST files become so popular ?  Well in short it comes down to 3 reasons:

1. Storage limits on the mailbox

2. Mobile or Offline Access

3. Easy to use

Storage limits probably count for the biggest reasons people use PST files .. end users have shown over the years that they will not delete data and will attempt to find a way to store data somewhere .. PST files are the easy way out.  The second reason is something that is inherited from the earliest versions when OST files were not available and this usage stuck with people.   Easy to use?  Well .. anyone that uses Outlook at home and uses POP3 to download their email from their internet provider probably uses a PST file.

Written on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 and filed under Email Archiving, Martin Tuip, PST Files, Storage Management.
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