PST FAQ

Korry Clark  February 29 2008 11:21:53 AM

It was been some time since I have contributed to the blogs , so I decided that a quick intro to the PST file format may be useful. With more people utilizing PST files as a data storage, some technical knowledge regarding the properties of PST files can always be useful in deciding if PST file are for you.  

Currently there are two types of PST files.  The pre Outlook 2003 format, ANSI, which has a size limit of 2G. Once the size of the PST file approaches 1.8G you may experience issues adding additional messages to the PST and the likelihood of the file becoming corrupt increases.  The second format which was introduced with Outlook 2003 is Unicode and has a size limit of 20G.  Not sure why anyone would want to have a PST file size of 20G.

The design of a PST is to be accessed locally and neither PST file formats are supported by accessing them across a LAN or WAN. Each PST file can hold a maximum of 65,535 items in each of the default Outlook folders, such as Calendar, Contacts, Deleted Items, Journal, Notes, Sent Items, and Tasks.

What happens when the PST becomes corrupt?  Microsoft offers the Inbox Repair tool (Scanpst.exe) which is designed to help repair problems that are associated with personal folder (.PST) files. The idea of the utility is to analyses the file directory structure and item headers and then tries to recover all folders and items.

PST files can be an very effective storage for old email messages, but with any file format there is always a chance of corruption if you don't follow the limits, rules of the file format.  I hope these facts provided some useful information.

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