How big is your Outlook PST file?

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sxz

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#152102 16-Sep-2014 10:30

Mine is at 8gb. That's roughly a year and a half of emails. I have not noticed it slow down my computer (1.5 year old i5 office machine). My emails get linked to a client management system & backed up, but I like to keep them in outlook for quick easy searching.

I'm curious - how big is your PST file? How big is too big? Do you notice differences when you delete old emails?

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#1129690 16-Sep-2014 10:34

Wow, 8GB is monstrous. pst's used to be limited to 2GB, though that limit is a decade old now. I think it was upped to 20GB at that stage, though is about 50GB now.

BoydHQ

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#1129717 16-Sep-2014 10:41

Mine is less than 1GB but I use an Outlook add-on that archives emails to a SQL database so emails I want to keep are in there.

nathan

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#1129729 16-Sep-2014 10:55

Mine is over 50GB

You'll want an SSD instead of spinning rust

xpd

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#1129732 16-Sep-2014 10:56

I tell users to keep them under 4GB, split them into years/months if need be.
One file lost = all email lost.
One of 12+ files lost = maybe a month of emails lost.

XPD / Gavin

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Demeter

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#1129736 16-Sep-2014 11:02

Wut are PST I are Gmail.

Seriously though, who remembers MBX files? Because I do and I do not miss them, those red-headed little Microsoft step-children! >.> Work Exchange PST gets archived to Enterprise Vault at regular intervals, so I suspect less than 500MB stored in OST.

wasabi2k

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#1129738 16-Sep-2014 11:07

0, because PSTs are the DEVIL.

Gmail for personal.
Exchange + Archive Mailbox for work.

We have well over a terabyte of PSTs around the place - despite hammering them at every opportunity, ingesting into Exchange etc.

I have seen 20-50GB+ PSTs running off file shares. They break DFS-R, badly.

Next step is disabling all PST functionality by group policy.

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lxsw20

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#1129741 16-Sep-2014 11:07

3GB OST. Symantec Enterprise Vault automagically archives our mail after 1 year.

nathan

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#1129742 16-Sep-2014 11:08

PSTs on remote file shares is asking for trouble, as I'm sure you'll know

wasabi2k

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#1129745 16-Sep-2014 11:14

nathan: PSTs on remote file shares is asking for trouble, as I'm sure you'll know

Preaching to the choir man.

sxz

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#1129747 16-Sep-2014 11:18

nathan: Mine is over 50GB

You'll want an SSD instead of spinning rust

Top effort!

Tell me this - do you notice it slowing down your outlook?

Demeter

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#1129776 16-Sep-2014 11:54

nathan: PSTs on remote file shares is asking for trouble, as I'm sure you'll know

But surely storing my users' PST files on a shared drive is a Good Idea™ because then I can backup only a single server?

...

I am kidding of course. I spent years trying to convince the IT manager of a company I did support for that the reason the majority of my support time was spent recovering PST files from backup tapes is because he insisted they be kept on a network store. Le sigh.

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nathan

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#1129909 16-Sep-2014 13:34

sxz:
nathan: Mine is over 50GB

You'll want an SSD instead of spinning rust

Top effort!

Tell me this - do you notice it slowing down your outlook?

Outlook 2013 and 2010 no, cant remember earlier than that

If it was on spinning rust it would be virtually unusable

mattwnz

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#1129964 16-Sep-2014 14:42

Really depends on how many emails with attachments you get. But with many webmail based email services like yahoo now offering unlimited diskspace, people use outlook in the same way and never delete emails. Think mine is at about 10GB, but that is over many years, and that probably isn't much these days.

Glassboy

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#1130010 16-Sep-2014 15:12

In my (long) experience you want to keep them under 2GB. They're not a memory efficient database,and the tools for dealing with corruption like scanpst are more successful with smaller files. You also don't want to be trying to copy large PSTs to USB drives for backup etc.

Also don't feed them at night or get them wet.

bob199214

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#1130374 17-Sep-2014 01:38

The larger is your PST file, the lower will be the Outlook performs. And it is not a good practice to let the PST file larger than 10GB, otherwise, it is prone to corrupt. See http://www.datanumen.com/articles/prevent-pst-corruption.htm .

Therefore, you may either using the archive function in Outlook to archive some of the old emails. Or classify the emails by yourself and split some of the emails to other PST files, since now Outlook support to manage several PST files at the same time.

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