Users who have an email account on Microsoft Exchange server prefer to use Outlook for its powerful email management features as well as the wide variety of personal management features available. More importantly, Outlook gives you the facility to work with your emails even when you are not connected to the Microsoft Exchange server and allows you to synchronize the offline data with the mailbox on the server once you are re-connected to the server. Outlook stores all this data in Offline Storage Folders (OST files).
The only concern while working offline with Outlook is the possibility that software problems lead to corruption in these OST files. Some of the most common software problems that could cause damage to OST files, requiring you to carry out an OST recovery, are as follows:
· Malicious or Virus Attacks: Some of the most frequently occurring and highly avoidable problems that cause certain corruption in OST files are virus attacks and other kind of malicious attacks on the system. Most viruses can instantly infect and damage the OST files making them virtually inaccessible. The solution for these problems is fairly simple ' install a high quality anti-virus software on the Microsoft Exchange server as well as on your local machine and conduct regular virus scans.
· After working with Outlook in an offline mode, when you connect to the Microsoft Exchange server that actually hosts your mailbox and try to synchronize between the offline folder files and the server files, you may come across some error messages. This may include inability to open some Outlook items, conflict between certain items and so on.
· While it is hard to believe, at times, an attempt at OST recovery may lead to more corruption in the files. For example, if you suspect that an OST file is corrupt because of some error messages that crop up or because of a sluggish response, you might attempt to carry out a file system recovery.
o Sometimes, this results in part of the original offline storage folders being permanently damaged or being overwritten by garbage data. This results in an incomplete or incorrect recovery of data stored in these OST files.
o The recovery tool that you are using may not be advanced enough to scan through the damaged data and retrieve the valid data into a usable OST file. This may render the damaged OST file completely useless.
o Similarly, the recovery tool may have scanned and retrieved the correct data blocks but may have failed in combining them in the same structure as in the original OST files, again rendering them unusable.
It is therefore very important that while attempting to carry out an OST recovery on a damaged or corrupt OST file, you choose a fairly sophisticated and reliable recovery tool. Tools such as Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen are built by experts with years of experience in data recovery and are successful not only in restoring almost all the data from damaged OST files but also in reconstructing them in the same structure as the original OST files.