Using the Inbox Repair Tool for Outlook Data Recovery
While working with any application that is going to be storing a lot of your personal or professional data, you should get into the habit of taking regular backups and of familiarizing yourself with repair tools that will help you recover data in case the storage file gets damaged. For example, if you are using Microsoft Office Outlook 2000 or higher, it is possible that one day you are unable to open your Outlook folders. After some research, you may realize that the storage file containing all Outlook data ' the PST file ' has been damaged and that you need to carry out a PST recovery on the file.
Microsoft provides a very handy utility called the Inbox Repair Tool that is very effective when it comes to fixing errors in PST files that are still accessible. However, there are times, when the Inbox Repair Tool alone is not enough.
Some versions of Outlook place an upper limit of 2 GB on the PST file and if it happens to exceed this limit, the file gets instantly corrupted. Later versions of Outlook have had this limit stretched to 20 GB. Nevertheless, you have to be very careful that your PST file stays within limits else it may get corrupted. In such cases, the Inbox Repair Tool is ineffective in carrying out any kind of PST recovery unless the file has been brought down to within limits.
For these reasons, Microsoft also provides a crop tool, which is useful in removing some data from the PST file and then allowing the Inbox Repair Tool to work on it to restore the data. However, you can never be sure of what data you are going to lose and because of the destructive nature of this tool, users are constantly advised to keep their PST files at an optimum level so that the Inbox Repair Tool can restore damaged PST files quickly.
If your PST file is not very large in size and the Inbox Repair Tool is unable to repair the file, you could try one of the following solutions:
· If you are using Microsoft Outlook in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server and the PST file gets corrupted, you could try to use the Inbox Repair Tool with the Corporate or Workgroup option.
· If you are using third-party add-ins that are causing problems in the PST file, you should remove them so that poorly designed software do not cause degradation in the performance of your Outlook software.
You could easily turn to more powerful repair tools such as Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen to carry out an efficient PST recovery. These tools can easily recover almost all the items stored in the PST file such as email messages, appointments, folders, meeting requests, posts, contacts and distribution lists, journals, notes, tasks and task requests, etc. In fact, all the properties of email messages such as from, to, cc, bcc, date and subject are also recovered. Advanced Outlook Repair, for example, can recover mail messages in various formats ' plain text, HTML or RTF. It can recover embedded or attached documents and images as well.
