1.3.2 Physical Organization of the PST File Format

This section provides an overview of the physical layout of the various concepts that were introduced in section 1.3.1. The following diagram illustrates the high-level file organization of a PST.

Figure 3: Physical organization of the PST file format

This file format is organized with a header element followed by allocation information pages at regular intervals that are interspersed with extensible data blocks. The header section includes metadata about the PST and information that points to the data sections that contain the message store and its contents. The following sections cover each of these elements in further detail.