Monday, May 21, 2012

Convert OST to PST to access corrupt or orphaned OST file

Enterprises require a collaborative communication environment. For this, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook work in conjunction. Since, some users might be working off-site where the connectivity with the company's Exchange Server can not be established, MS Outlook has the ability to work in Cached Exchange Mode.

The Offline mode or Cached Exchange mode Outlook creates a copy of the Exchange Server maibox onto the local machine and carries out the operations on the local drive. This is possible with the help of OST files. In order to send and receive new emails, and to update the Server mailbox with all the offline work synchronization is done between the Exchange Server and MS Outlook.

This synchronization can fail at times in lieu of unforeseen factors such as hard drive failure, attack by a virus or malicious software, abrupt system shutdown, improper Outlook termination or poor network connection. Failed or erronous synchronization will make the OST file inaccessible.

Moreover, accidental deletion of Exchange Server mailbox or any modification to the Exchange profile will render the Outlook OST file as orphaned. A corrupt or orphaned OST file becomes unusable causing loss of significant data such as vital emails, contacts and appointments.

A corrupt or damaged OST file needs to be repaired to make it accessible again. An inbuilt utility by Microsoft is the Inbox Repair Tool (Scanost) by Microsoft. This tool will scan the OST file, checking for all sorts of errors and corruption and repairs it. A major drawback associated with this utility is that it restructures the entire OST file and removes all those elements that become unreadable due to corruption. This means, cardinal information can be lost.

To carry out safe and error free OST recovery, one needs to Convert OST to PST. To Convert OST to PST, third party tools are available that support almost all major versions of MS Outlook and MS Exchange Server. By converting OST to PST the software will scan the OST file in question and recover all the items into a usable and Outlook importable PST file.

All the user mailbox items such as emails, contacts, notes, tasks, journals and calendar entries can be recovered as a new PST file. The userr also has the option to append recovered data into an exisitng PST file. One such amazing utility is “OST to PST Converter”. This product is the choice of millions of users across the globe to Convert OST to PST. The software is compatible with MS Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000.