I know people who have tens of gigabytes of information squirrelled away in Personal Storage Files (PSTs). They have accumulated this information over the years and the data has often ended up in PSTs because they’ve been forced to move items out of online mailboxes to comply with mailbox quotas. Remember, it’s not so long ago since disk was expensive and the average mailbox quota assigned to new users in corporate Exchange deployments ranged from 100MB to 200MB.

Small mailbox quotas and the resulting small (and easily maintained) databases delight administrators but are a real pain to users as they then have to play the drag-and-drop game to shuffle items out to PSTs in order that Exchange can deliver new messages into the mailbox. Of course, some users positively delight in filing items into PSTs to build up a set of files over the years. These folk tend to be very organized and end up with a PST per project or a PST per year or some other such accumulation of PSTs that clutter up their PC and become yet another set of data that has to be migrated once the time arrives for the user to move to a new PC.

In any case, whether you are a filer who boasts a proud collection of beautifully organized PSTs or an average person who has been forced to move items in a higgledy-piggledy fashion into a PST dumping grouground, the time might come when you need to make a decision about where that data should be stored in the long term. Let’s face it, PSTs have a chequered history when it comes to corruption (less so now with the latest UUENCODE format than with the older ANSI files) and some of us are not very good at backing up PC files, so there’s always the potential that some disaster will come along that results in data loss.