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OST
File Recovery and PST File Recovery
By Nehaa Gupta
Email communication
has expanded itself from professionals to normal home users. As
a child enters into teenage, he becomes familiar with the power
and usefulness of email communication and uses emails to correspond
within his circle of friends and relatives. If we quickly look at
some of the public email portals like Yahoo, Hotmail, Rediff etc;
it can be analyzed that these portals regularly increase email storage
limits for its users and as long more space is provided will thus
encourage the user to utilize it.
Email communication
proves more useful in the corporate world where hundreds of emails
are exchanged daily between the professionals. They could be meeting
notices, memorandums, important business attachments or simple emails
of well being. If the importance of email communication has increased,
so has increased the importance of data storage and the level of
corruptions of email messages. This importance has resulted into
duplication of data and information, data archives, and waste of
hard drive storage space.
Email Storage
:
As you receive
many emails in a day, have you ever wondered where these emails
get stored? The answer could be an email server or on the user’s
computer system. MS Outlook and Outlook Express are the widely used
email clients because of their ease of use and user friendly features.
While working on MS Outlook, the email files are stored in PST and
OST file formats and an exchange server is maintained to handle
the incoming and outgoing emails. Now arise the common questions;
what is exchange server, .pst files and .ost files and how are they
used to store emails?
Microsoft Exchange
Server:
Microsoft Exchange
Server is a messaging system which supports transfer of internal
and external electronic messages. The application is widely used
in organizations where Microsoft infrastructure solutions are used.
The exchange server stores data in highly organized relational database
with the help of algorithms thus helps in transfer of mails and
manages communication between other Exchange servers also.
How does Exchange
Server work?
As the Exchange
server stores messages and manages incoming and outgoing process
of emails, the working of the messaging server also becomes a crucial
point. The process of receiving, sending and managing the messages
by Exchange server is as follows:
Step 1: The
client connects to the server and sends the message.
Step 2: The exchange server then processes the message and determines
saving location in the messaging database.
Step 3: The recipient of the message is notified by the server.
Step 4: The client to receive the message connects to the server
and receives the message.
The simple working
of the exchange server makes it easy for us to send and receive
messages, thus transferring data electronically.
MS Outlook –
Personal Storage Files -
“The file where
MS Exchange server delivers messages”
The Personal
Storage File (.pst) is the most robust storage container of emails
and MS Outlook has the ability to store and deliver messages in
the .pst file format, other file types can also be stored inside
the PST file. But the PST file can get corrupt due to accidental
file deletion, virus attacks or it can get damaged internally causing
into data loss. There are number of email recovery and pst recovery
software which effectively recovers mails and data from the corrupt
pst files.
MS Outlook –
Offline Storage Files -
“The storage
file where emails and other information can be stored, which can
also be accessed offline.”
In the corporate
arena, Exchange Servers are used to store email messages. The Outlook
Offline Storage Folder (.OST) in Microsoft Outlook provides unique
synchronization method with an Exchange Server and existing mailbox
accounts. The OST file gets stored on a users computer system which
constantly gets synchronized with the Exchange mailbox account,
which results into duplication of data on exchange server and on
the user’s system. Access to .ost file requires an Exchange mailbox
account, and if the mailbox is damaged, missing or removed, the
.ost file will not open. For this you need to convert the .ost file
to .pst file on your own or try the exchange ost recovery software.
Here I would
like to guide you with some simple steps, following which you can
convert the damaged .ost file to .pst file successfully in Outlook
2002 or 2003. This is the method which worked for me:
1. Backup the
ost file(s)
2. Rename the outlook.ost file to outlook.pst file
3. Use scanpst.exe from Outlook 2002 to repair the outlook.pst file.
(C: Program FilesCommon FilesSystemMSMapi1033)
4. Rename outlook.pst back to outlook.ost
5. Run OST to PST which will then successfully convert the file
to outlook.pst
6. MS Outlook will then open the outlook.pst file
OST/PST file
formats are very complex and are designed around relational database
concepts. The messages in these files are organized in hierarchical
format using folders to store the messages. If the above mentioned
steps do not work in your case of corruption, then it might be due
to major corruption which can be effectively repaired by the ost
recovery software. There are number of OST file recovery and PST
file recovery software to convert and repair your damaged email
files.
Neha Gupta is
a technical writer for Nucleus Data Recovery, provider of the best
data recovery software and data recovery services.
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