ezjensen

 Profile Answers by ezjensen 

• Apr 12th, 2009

 

.pst files are all the emails (and files attatched to those emails), calendar, contacts, tasks, etc. stored locallyon your machine.

.pst are created when using Outlook  to manage your email (Gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol,etc.)  they can also be created within an Exchange environment, however, Microsoft doesn't recomment this due to the .pst being very unstable and if your pc were to crash you would loose all of your emails.  In an Exchange environment, using .pst removes the emails from the Exchange server and stores them locally.

.ost files are simply a copy of your mailbox that is stored on the Exchange server.  Think of this as a type of email cache file.  This leaves the emails on the server, but also stores a copy of emails since your last sync on the local machine.