Share via

PST’s not supported on the LAN…?

  • Article

This is a new one on me - ‘Personal folder files are unsupported over a LAN or over a WAN link’.

“The .pst files are not meant to be a long-term, continuous-use method of storing messages in an enterprise environment. (!?!) The article also suggests two alternatives to .pst files. You can use .ost files or Microsoft Windows Terminal Services.”

And this blog is a year old but a useful read on the same subject: ‘Network Stored PST files ... don't do it!’

“…imagine if you had a couple of hundred users who each have two or three PST files.  These users have been with the company for a while, and they rarely (if ever!) delete their email from their PST files.  The files continue to grow in size - let's use an average of 1 GB as the size of the PST file.  Now consider that when each user launches Outlook, they make a request for two (or three) files, each of them being about 1 GB in size.  Then consider what happens when 200 users all launch Outlook around the same time when they get to work.  200 x 3 x 1 = 600 GB of data being requested at the same time.  That's an awful lot of Disk & Network I/O to process simultaneously.  This is a very common scenario - the file server "freezing" for a few minutes at a time while it tries to service these requests.”

Now I’m not saying I would have ever recommended this but I hadn’t come across this official, public information…

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.clickandsolve.com/?p=13835

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    It's funny how many YEARS I've told this to clients -- yet this still continues.   Of course, it's great that Microsoft also has a program call SCANPST . . . because you'll be using it many times! (^_^) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287497 Blake Handler - Microsoft MPV "The Road to Know Where"

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2009
    Yes - used that a few times. I was actually thinking since I blogged this that this is SO old that I'd probably forgotten that I knew it, if you know what I mean.

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2009
    I have seen a kb that says you should not do this (network share a pst file) with Outlook XP or older. But I promise you when Outlook 2003 came out Microsoft was saying that you could! However, as you noticed, it is the file servers that are having problems now... Anyway using this archiver viewer we don't need PST files anymore anyway. http://goffconcepts.com/products/gea/index.html