Biggest .PST file ever????

blastman

blastman

blastman

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Hey all,

A user has just complained to me that his outlook is running really slowly and keeps crashing.

I had a quick look to see how big the .PST file was and noticed it was 16GB !!!! :eek: :rolleyes:


Anyone else had experenice with huge .PST files???

Whats the biggest you've ever seen???
 
gillywibble said:
Don't you have limits?
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No we can't as we don't have an exchange server, only POP.

Unless anyone know's of a way to limit the size of these files by GPO or something???

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The PST file of the head of the school i work at is a whopping 18gb!! he really needs to sort out his email before he starts getting major problems
 
Perhaps it works different if its using POP mail, but in exchange (sometime since I worked with it mind) the main .pst will start to fail when nearing 2GB, however I think additional .pst's dont suffer the same issue.

I am sure someone who is working in exchange support capacity will post with more current information.
 
Older versions of outlook pre 2003 did have a problem with going over the 2gb limit, were it would become corrupt.
However this is no longer a problem however Windows does limit the capacity to 2gb when connected to a exchange server but this can be changed via editing the registry, not sure why its not the same for Pop3 accounts!

Edit
or as ruffneck just posted, the split second before me :p
 
ruffneck said:
apparently its because pre outlook 2003, pst's are encoded in ANSI which has a 2gb limit.

From 2003 onwards its encoded in unicode which has a 33TB limit!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pst
Click to expand...

we're running outlook 2003 with pop server and there's no limit that I know of. Hence the huge size!!

Anyone know where in the registery this setting is located?? I might deploy a GPO to add an entry, stop the likes of this happening agian!!
 
IAmATeaf said:
Nobody heard of archiving then? :)
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You should try educating him into the process of archiving them, i was literally banging my head against the desk trying to get him to do this.


I'm surprised myself that his PST hasn't corrupted yet at that size as i'm sure i read somewhere 2gb is the recommended limit for a PST before corruption can easily occur
 
Recently dealt with a client who had a combined total of 25GB of PSTs..... was a nightmare trying to sort all that out.. some were backups.. but slightly different file sizes... grr....... HOUSEKEEPING PEOPLE!

I left her to it lol
 
I once had a user in India who had a single 19gb pst file, she was wondering why it kept corrupting.
 
Ours are limited to 1.8GB and those are slow as **** when trying to repair them using scanpst, normally a 4/5 hour jobby. 16GB would take a good 3 days to run repair on our system!
 
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