Pst Files Or Outlook Pst
This Personal Storage Table (.pst) is a proprietary file format used by Microsoft Outlook to store user mailbox information, such as messages, contacts, notes, calendar events, and other items. This open file format is controlled by Microsoft, which offers specifications and irrevocable technology licensing without charging a single penny. PST files are also referred are Personal Folder File or Personal Address Book. PST file Follows fixed block based allocation scheme, which means that files gets enlarged using fixed amount of bytes. Thus, when data files, such as email messages are added, the size of the PST file is automatically adjusted by the mailing client. However, when emails are deleted, the size of the PST file remains the same, and the space is marked as unallocated in order to save the future email messages.Microsoft Outlook allows to protect the PST file by using a password. It also offers different kinds of values for encryption stetting, such as None, Compressible, and High. PST file is structured as a B-tree with carries 512 byte nodes and leafs. In the older versions of MS Outlook, including Outlook 2002 does not supports Unicode, hence, uses ANSI encoding, which has a maximum storage limit of 2 GB. Moreover, MS Outlook 2003 and 2007 supports Unicode, and has maximum storage limit of 20 GB, whereas MS Outlook 2010, the default storage limitation is increased to 50 GB.
Apart from all this, Microsoft provides various tools, such as PST2GB, which can be used to truncate, when PST file has reached to its maximum storage limit (2GB). The other tool is scanpst.exe, which helps in repairing PST files corrupted or damaged due to other unwanted factors.If the corruption rate is high due to which PST file have got severely damaged, at this point of time a user can use PST file recovery software.
