Term: pst [Personal STore]

PST is an acronym for Personal STore (short for storage), and is the file format used by the Microsoft Office Outlook email and personal information management program.

In addition to email, PST files can contain calendar, contacts, notes, journal and other information used and manipulated by Outlook.

The advantage of the PST is that it is a single file; all information can be copied to another machine or backed up simply by operating on that single file.

The disadvantage of the PST is that it is a proprietary file format readable only by Office Outlook. It’s also a relatively complex format – almost a complete file system – and as a result can occasionally suffer from corruption and accompanying data loss. Microsoft provides the utility “scanpst” to scan and repair PST files suspected to have issues.