Splitting a PST file

Pinkeyes

Pinkeyes

Pinkeyes

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Does anyone know of any software which will allow me to take an Outlook PST file and break it up into smaller junks ?

Currently have users with PST files of nearly a gig in size, on a NAS RAIDed server. If 2 or 3 of them use these massive PST files at the same time, it brings the server to its knees for a few seconds cause lockups to all the users.

Any help would be greatly recieved.

We are going down the SAN route soon, so it won't be a problem then.
 
I did try to use a freeware PST splitter about a year ago and it left them corrupt since then I just opened up thier PST locally, made a new PST and drag/dropped contents until they were a better size. If it's vital emails I wouldn't risk a splitter again.
 
Archive of older stuff? I would not recommend trying to split the PST. There is a 2gig limit to a PST file so you should not really be having many problems at the moment.

sfx
 
You could always do what I told my users, if you need such a huge amount of old emails then you'll have to have them local on your PC or backed up on CD which you keep.

I spent a long time repairing 2gb + pst files thanks to graphic designers who didnt want to trash old attachments they'd been sent 4 years ago even though they had the files in thier network storage folders..

users! :mad:
 
Thanks for the responses.

The files are not bigger than 2 Gig, and the sizes of them a problem.
The fact that all our staffs files live on a NAS Raid server means that massive disk activity is cause when a user drops a tiny email into their archive file.

We have now set Group Policy to stop users making a PST file over 300 meg. Which should do the trick, but we have several users with PSTs nearing a gig (which they now cannot use due to its size).

I will go down the "make new PST file, copy emails from old Massive file to new one".
Tip though, the PST file doesn't shrink when you move mails out of it until you compress it. Or so it seems...
 
Are you using iSCSI on the NAS box, if not you shouldn't really be using a NAS box for Email storage as this is Application data. A way round this is to use iSCSI over the network to the NAS units, or as you say to go the SAN route, probably using fibre to enable a high enough throughput of data when these users are wanting to access their data.
 
Just get you users to archive their emails to their local disk. As said before, I make my users archive their old stuff or it gets deleted. Attachement emails go first.

TrUz
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

Origin said:
Are you using iSCSI on the NAS box, if not you shouldn't really be using a NAS box for Email storage as this is Application data. A way round this is to use iSCSI over the network to the NAS units, or as you say to go the SAN route, probably using fibre to enable a high enough throughput of data when these users are wanting to access their data.
Click to expand...

We don't use the NAS's for Email storage. They are the users file servers. Email is stored elsewhere.
The problem is the users archive their emails into PST files which they keep in their file storage area.


TrUz said:
Just get you users to archive their emails to their local disk. As said before, I make my users archive their old stuff or it gets deleted. Attachement emails go first.
Click to expand...

A viable option, and one we thought of - but we want a complete "roaming" option for our users. It's a college so staff move all the time. Although the staff have their own machines, they rarely spend any time on them.
 
Pinkeyes can you point me to the direction of how you made the PST limit GPO? Just doing a random read and found this post and we are doing a similar thing at my company at the moment.

We are going down the *.msg route for project emails and using a great ickle program called messagesave to do this. But any private PST we would like to limit the size on.
 
This is a problem we have at work, and we limit peoples mail accounts because of it. Splitting files into smaller chunks is not a good idea, i have seenfar too many get corrupted to chance it.

You really are in a rut here, and i know it aint easy, but there is no simple solution. I work for a large company and if there was a solution for it, we would have done it. Your going to have to inforce limitations on mail accounts.

Roughly how many mail accounts do you have? I suppose you could set up a scheduled task to sync the PST files over night from each machine?
 
Matt-Page said:
This is a problem we have at work, and we limit peoples mail accounts because of it. Splitting files into smaller chunks is not a good idea, i have seenfar too many get corrupted to chance it.

You really are in a rut here, and i know it aint easy, but there is no simple solution. I work for a large company and if there was a solution for it, we would have done it. Your going to have to inforce limitations on mail accounts.

Roughly how many mail accounts do you have? I suppose you could set up a scheduled task to sync the PST files over night from each machine?
Click to expand...

We are avoiding the "splitting" route in favour of createing a new PST file and moving half the stuff in to it. Once we have removed the rogue large PST files, it will no longer be a problem as policy now prevents anyone going over the size limit. Thank you for the help.
 
Madmrcopper said:
Pinkeyes can you point me to the direction of how you made the PST limit GPO? Just doing a random read and found this post and we are doing a similar thing at my company at the moment.

We are going down the *.msg route for project emails and using a great ickle program called messagesave to do this. But any private PST we would like to limit the size on.
Click to expand...

No problem.

You need to download and install the Outlook 2003 ADM (Google will show you where) - and then under Group Policy you will go:

Group Policy -> User Config -> Admin Templates -> MS Office Outlook 2003 -> Micellaneous -> PST Settings.

Hope this helps, if you want more details, fee free to email me (email in Trust)
 
Madmrcopper said:
Thanks pinkeyes passed the details onto the GPO guys here. Plus we got some more stuff out of it that we wanted too!
Click to expand...

No problem at all - they are very handy things :D
 
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