Comments on: TIP: Repairing Outlook .ost and .pst files

By: repair .pst files

repair .pst files — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:47:14 +0000

That and it cant do files of 2gb or larger. The only other option is a third party pst repair tool. They might charge for it, but I couldn’t put a price on the ‘value’ of my pst file.

http://www.pstfilerepair.com

pst file repair

By: zlatan24

zlatan24 — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:15:04 +0000

I heard about not bad application-ost to pst software, convert from ost to pst software will convert *.ost to *.pst extension, that can be easily opened by any email client, compatible with Microsoft Outlook, recover your contacts, messages and calendars, is very easy to use even for beginners, we do not care about you computer skills, friendly graphic interface permits to perform all operations in several mouse clicks.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:10:37 +0000

Hi Ducas,

Interesting. Theoretically you should be able to delete the local .ost file and Outlook will automatically rebuild it next time it connects to the Exchange server. The problem with this approach of course is that it can take ages if you have a huge .ost file since it has to resynch everything including sent mail, all your folders etc (and hence using scanpst is the preferred option).
But if scanpst doesn’t work, and you don’t want to have to wait ages for a big re-sync then your backup suggestion is nice option.

Cheers,
Craig

By: Ducas Francis

Ducas Francis — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 10:14:39 +0000

I’ve found scanpst to be a great tool in the past that works about 90% of the time…

But I’ve had some real weird experiences with OST’s. A recent one was that whenever I’d select a folder in Outlook that was on my exchange mail account, I’d get a message to the effect of "There was an error reading the folder"… When I used a search folder, however, it was able to read the contents of the folder easily.

Outlook’s scan tools couldn’t fix it so i took matters into my own hands.

I backed up the entire mailbox, blew away the ost (in Vista – C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost) created a new one and restored from the backup. It took me about an hour, but it was well worth it.

By: Craig Bailey

Craig Bailey — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:28:37 +0000

Thanks Anthony,

For others reading, the link in Anthony’s comment is:
http://anthonymilner.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/outlook-2007-responsiveness/

Cheers,
Craig

By: Anthony

Anthony — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:18:31 +0000

Thanks for the tip. A couple of things you probably already know about re Outlook2007 performance, but just in case…

1. There is a patch that fixes known performance issues with .ost .pst .

2. If you’re running Google Desktop make sure you get the latest version. older version stop the Outlook process from shutting down which causes a delay on restart as the .ost is checked.