E-Rkive stores all text from emails in a database. When you elect to search or filter messages, only the database is used to fetch the results. It is not until you open a message that the original message is retrieved and displayed.

This means that you are only searching or filtering a very small part of the archive to retrieve the results. This also means that large archive load much quicker as only the database part of the archive is ever loaded into E-Rkive.

In the following example,the YELLOW portion in the graph indicates the size of the database in relation to the rest of the archive (RED indicates space used by messages without attachments, BLUE indicates space used by messages with attachments)

As the graph demonstrates, the database that is used for all search and filter operations in E-Rkive is around 45MB (around 12% of the entire archive size). The graph also demostrates that if you were searching and filtering on the .pst file you would be searching through a file that is 717MB in size.

That’s a file 16 times larger that needs to be searched/filtered to return the same results!