Splitting a PST file

[Pinkeyes]

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.

 

[Pinkeyes]

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...

 

[Pinkeyes]

Thanks for the replies guys.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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?

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.

 

[Pinkeyes]

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.

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)

 

[Pinkeyes]

Thanks pinkeyes passed the details onto the GPO guys here. Plus we got some more stuff out of it that we wanted too!

No problem at all - they are very handy things