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With the Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 version, the Personal Folders file is no longer restricted to 2 GB but can support much larger files, even those that extend up to 33TB. This can get to be a problem especially for system administrators who have to worry about users letting their PST files grow enormously large taking up a lot of hard disk space. On the other hand, one cannot deny that there is a tremendous advantage in the large file size limit for the Personal Folder file or PST file - for one, the users do not have to constantly keep an eye on the size of the file and secondly, there need not be a fear of the PST file getting damaged quickly due to the file exceeding size limit. If the Outlook file gets damaged as a result of size problems, the only alternative is to repair outlook and restore the data. Considering all this, system administrators have to consider monitoring or even controlling the usage of PST files in their organization.

Outlook can use the Personal Folders file in more ways than one. The main PST file is the one that is used as the default information store when a user does not want to use the mailbox on the Microsoft Exchange server but prefers to use Outlook in a standalone manner. In addition to this main file, if the user enables the Auto-Archive feature, then Outlook moves older items out of the present folders into Archive PST files. The user may also prefer to do this manually by using the 'Import and Export' command to export the PST data to another PST file as a means of taking backup. Also, if the user adds a Hotmail account to the existing mail account, then Outlook automatically creates a new PST file for this account and stores a local cache of all the messages from this account on the local hard drive. As you can understand, if each one of these PST files is allowed to grow without any checks, very soon, the system will start running out of disk space. This can lead to corruption in files and may again require the administrator to repair outlook.

One of the simplest ways of controlling the PST value is to modify the DisablePST registry value. In earlier versions of Outlook such as Outlook 2000 or 2002, this feature was used to prevent users of Outlook from creating additional PST files such as those created during the Auto-Archive process or through the 'Import and Export' command. In the later version of Outlook 2003, new registry and policy settings allow the administrator to not only control the type of PST files that users could create but also set PST file size limits and control the access to PST files. This helps keep the Outlook file size to a reasonable limit ensuring that it never reaches the allowed limit or cause any damaged to the Outlook PST file.

If the administrator finds that there has been some corruption or damage to the main PST file, it is also possible to quickly repair outlook and recover all the data from the single file using recovery tools such as Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen.