Thursday 1 September 2011

Compress PST files

With more and more workers, colleagues and friends sending emails with large attachments, companies see themselves challenged with exploding .PST files. .PST files contain all the data of an Microsoft Outlook account and can pass several GB's in size. The large majority of this data is due to the attachments that the users has sent out. If you multiply the size of .PST files by the number of email accounts, companies reach easily several Terabytes of email data residing on primary storage and this is expensive.

How to Compress .PST Files?
As attachments and more to the point, attached unstructured files such as PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, PDF files, images like screenshots and photos are the reason for the size of .PST files, the question is how to compress .PST files? The answer is it is not easy. First, attached unstructured files such as a JPG image represent already pre-compressed content, so no further size reduction is achieved if users simply "zip" .PST files. In addition to changing the original format to a zipped file, the size reduction is close to zero. In fact, compressing .PST files starts early - when the unstructured file enters the .PST container for the first time.

Native Optimization of Email Attachments
Native Optimization means that files are reduced in size without changing the original file format. balesio has developed the most advanced technology of Native Format Optimization, resulting in 50-90% smaller files while maintaining all functional aspects of a file, i.e. its accessibility, functionality and handling. Using balesio's client solution FILEminimizer Suite, attachments are natively optimized and reduced by 50-90% before they are sent out via email (on-the-fly).

Compression of .PST files as a Consequence
Thanks to the optimization of email attachments on the go, the growth rate of .PST files is significantly and permanently reduced as less data enters the .PST file. This leads to:
  • - Reduced Email Attachment Traffic
  • - Reduced Email Storage
  • - Reduced .PST file sizes
  • - Reduced Network Traffic
  • - Reduced Support for over-sized Attachments
 Download a Fact Sheet about balesio's Native Format Optimization technology and the FILEminimizer Suite software solution:
Fact Sheet FILEminimizer Suite (PDF)