Largest .PST files you have found

[Pvt.Dancer]

So today I have seen by far the largest .PST file so far in my career. One of the executives that works for a company that my company does IT work for had a Whopping 35 gig .PST file!

Time spent trying to explain to an executive that its thier fault without saying it? priceless.

Lets see if anyone can beat that lol!

 

[Convicted1]

So today I have seen by far the largest .PST file so far in my career. One of the executives that works for a company that my company does IT work for had a Whopping 35 gig .PST file!

Time spent trying to explain to an executive that its thier fault without saying it? priceless.

Lets see if anyone can beat that lol!

I'm gonna say that thats probably gotta be a record or something...

Seems somebody is either REALLLLLLY important, or REALLY bad about not throwing anything at all away. LOL

I've seen some in the couple of hundreds... But certainly never over a gig... Much less 35 gigs.

Thats just crazy!

 

[Pvt.Dancer]

well I would say he is important and Bad about mail box management... also we weren't doing this Companies IT from the beginning so there were no policies in place to prevent this. its a huge headache now.

 

[SimpleSimon]

I work for a company that specialises in migrating PST files in to archive solutions. I was working on a site recently where there were loads (and I mean LOADS!) of 40+Gb PST files. We worked on a customer site recently that had over 100Tb of PST files alone!

 

[Janus67]

Mine i've had since 2005 and is about 5-6GB last I checked. I've worked with a few that have been in the 20s. Fortunately, most of our users do not have them and instead use our terrible mimosa email archive system.

 

[SimpleSimon]

Most of our customers use Enterprise Vault or Exchange 2010 archive mailboxes and they seem pretty happy with those.
Why is the mimosa stuff bad?

 

[Janus67]

Partially how it is setup (everything older than 90 days is removed from your mailbox and is only accessible through the mediocre interface) and the overall slowness of trying to find something and if you couldn't remember which folder it was in you are screwed.

 

[Pinky]

Seen 30-ish, and several times back in Office 2003 days where people reached the 20GB limit. I've seen OST files in the near 50GB range. Which I think is the new "max".

 

[realmadrid12]

We have some execs with 20-30gig PSTs but we are now limiting mailbox sizes for our usual employees

 

[SimpleSimon]

We have some execs with 20-30gig PSTs but we are now limiting mailbox sizes for our usual employees

Doesn't that just make the issue worse? Or are you using some sort of alternative to combat people creating creating PST files when their mailbox fills up?

 

[realmadrid12]

Doesn't that just make the issue worse? Or are you using some sort of alternative to combat people creating creating PST files when their mailbox fills up?

Well I left out alot of details there, We limit mailbox size to 10 gigs and than force archiving via GP (I believe, although it may be through MX) each archive is a max of 10 gigs. We than have a backup utility that backups up each users PC on or off the network and it includes there PST files.

 

[Pvt.Dancer]

The next step after I get this exec trained on proper mailbox management... is setting up a GPO to get some archiving done. I don't want to deal with this issue again and I'm very upset with the idiots who set this company up... not even their AD structure was right I had to over haul that a month ago.


Though I'm glad to know I'm not alone.

 

[Bubba-Hotepp]

Heh, not alone at all. I had to migrate a .PST file over for the lady that works with my wife (her husband is one of the Psychs who owns the company) in the billing dept. It was almost 35GB. It came in at, if I remember correctly, 33 and some change. She had every email going back at least 5 years (that's where I gave up scanning through them). I tried to explain to her that she didn't need to keep every email, especially going back that far. I might as well have tried to convince a donkey to fly an airplane and dance the irish jig for all the good it did.

 

[mbentley]

Wow, I saw this thread and was just curious how large of .pst files you all have seen. I've seen ones that range from 5-6 GB or so and I thought those were huge! I would certainly hope that these people just get emails with large attachments or something because I seriously can't even imagine how much email you would have to get in order to hit file sizes that large. At that point, it would almost be impossible to do anything productive with your mail if you received that much.

 

[Bubba-Hotepp]

Wow, I saw this thread and was just curious how large of .pst files you all have seen. I've seen ones that range from 5-6 GB or so and I thought those were huge! I would certainly hope that these people just get emails with large attachments or something because I seriously can't even imagine how much email you would have to get in order to hit file sizes that large. At that point, it would almost be impossible to do anything productive with your mail if you received that much.

In the case I mentioned, I don't know exactly what's in the emails. some of them were 1MB+ in size. If I had to make an offhand guess, she probably gets on the order of at least 20-50 emails a day (from insurance companies, state health agencies, etc.). And considering it's all billing, claims back and forth, it doesn't take long for it to add up when someone is not only keeping every email they've ever received but every email in their sent box as well.

Edit - If that's what ya'll see on a daily basis, I'm more than glad I don't manage an exchange server. I'd be pulling my hair out every day

 

[chop_wood]

i have about a dozen clients in the 30's yuck.. im not sure the what the highest ive seen was

 

[Pvt.Dancer]

The guy with the .PST I was talking about is in charge of service and engineering and receives pics and CAD files. he had about 3 years worth of mail.

 

[robble]

Weird.. as soon as my pst at work hit 2 GB it corrupted and after a lot of work I was able to recover most of it.

Doing research it seemed they would always corrupt when they hit 2GB. I guess not.

 

[SteveLord]

Mine is just under 10 gigs after 4 years and roughly 30,000 emails received.

 

[Pvt.Dancer]

Time to start Archiving