Size of PST is misleading ?

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Guest

Lets say my PST was 900MB in size. I create a second PST
and move email into it. When I look at the PST size from
within Outlook (PST, properties, folder size) it reports
500MB. When I drill down to the Outlook folder which
contains the PST, I see 900MB. What's up with this?

I suspect the file size reported while in Outlook is
correct and the size reported by viewing the PST in the
actual Outlook folder is wrong. Is this correct?

This is not a single issue, many of my 150 PC's have the
same issue. Using Office XP with XP O/S.
 
Lets say my PST was 900MB in size. I create a second PST
and move email into it. When I look at the PST size from
within Outlook (PST, properties, folder size) it reports
500MB. When I drill down to the Outlook folder which
contains the PST, I see 900MB. What's up with this?

I suspect the file size reported while in Outlook is
correct and the size reported by viewing the PST in the
actual Outlook folder is wrong. Is this correct?
Click to expand...

My take on it is that they are both correct. The file system and Outlook
both view the PST in a different fashion and count different data as
relevent in the size count. For example, on my PC, the file system says my
PST is 34.9 Mb, but Outlook reports 33 Mb as the size (true, not as large a
discrepancy as you see). Outlook counts the sizes of the items in the PST,
but I suspect disregards the size of the metadata that it is using for its
own purposes and that isn't included in any folder. Such data may be the
date values associated with the items, the addresses in the PST of where to
find the items, the data structures that contain the folder names, and so
on.

The basic question is, though, why do you care?
 
My basic answer is Microsoft has documentation in Technet
stating the PST in Office XP has issues above 2GB. To
quote "The upper limit of a Personal Folder (.pst) is two
gigabytes. Often when a Personal Folder (.pst) approaches
this limit, you may not be able to save or retrieve
items". My experience shows that after 1.4GB, you are
rolling the dice. Could this be why Microsoft has
supplied us with PST repair and truncation tools?

I have spent days having to repair and truncate PST's
because of the "feature" in Microsoft. Try telling a
lawyer they just lost six months of email and see what
happens. Why Microsoft did not have the forsight to
display a warning message when the PST gets to large is
anyones guess.
 
Try telling a
lawyer they just lost six months of email and see what
happens.
Click to expand...

A ranting and raving lawyer is nothing new, but if they fail to read the
available documentation that says not to let PSTs exceed the maximum allowed
size, they have no one they can blame but themselves.
 
Where can I get these tools?

Thanks

Ron

A ranting and raving lawyer is nothing new, but if they fail to read the
available documentation that says not to let PSTs exceed the maximum allowed
size, they have no one they can blame but themselves.
Click to expand...
 
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