Probably, but the amount is highly dependent on the way you decide to use MAP. For example, if you decide to keep email less than 3 months old in Outlook, and import ALL email into MAP for searching, the email less than 3 months old will be stored twice on your hard disk (once for Outlook and once for MAP). Emails are saved by MAP in an Outlook-compatible format (.msg-file), the body is saved as a text file as well as an HTML file, and attachments are saved as extra files. Because of this, each email usually needs twice the disk space than if it was solely used by Outlook.

Is that really a problem? In 2004, you can purchase a 250 gigabyte hard drive for approximately $250. Therefore, the price of a GB is around $1. If you have around 20,000 mails in your archive this will be around 2 GB. If you could reduce that amount by 50% (or 1 GB) you would save…$1. At the same time, each working hour costs around $25 - and in most cases much more! In this day and age, saving time is much more important than saving disk space. And MAP will help you to save a lot of time.

There is another kind of storage that is still expensive, and that's the space needed for backups! Creating restorable backups cost money, because you need powerful backup hardware and software to manage these huge amounts of data. That's the reason why a lot of companies make incremental backups, i.e. they save only the new and changed files. With Outlook's use of .pst-files, this is impossible. As soon as a single email is received, the .pst-file is changed, and the entire file needs to be backed up again. However, if you use MAP it's no problem, because each email is stored invidividually using the standard file system. The only existing file that changes is the MAP database (approximately ~20 MB for 10,000 emails). When it comes to backing up your email, MAP saves time and money.

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