Man's Best Friend is His Dog

Microsoft Outlook allows you to work easily with email messages, appointments, address books, journals, project management tasks and many more in one single application. It typically stores all the Outlook data pertaining to these tasks like inbox or other email folders, calendar items and tasks, all the deleted items in offline storage files (OST) files on your local hard drive. This feature allows you to work on the data even when you are offline and then to simply synchronize the changes with the online mailbox when you establish connection with the Exchange server. And while OST files are fairly useful in their ability to store these items, there are times when they become corrupted forcing the user to convert OST to PST (personal storage files) so that the data can be accessed.

One of the major advantages of working with OST files is that you are no longer dependent on the connection to the Exchange server or on the quality of it. It could be fast or slow ' you can continue working at your convenience on the offline data. Typically you can perform every function on the offline data that you could expect to do when connected to the server. Therefore, even if there is a loss in the connection to the Exchange server or even if you are unable to establish connection to the server for some time, you do not have to stop working but can simply continue with the offline OST files. If you are unable to access the OST files because they are inaccessible, you may have to try and convert the OST to PST so that there is at least no loss in data.

If you are faced with a situation where an OST file becomes inaccessible, the server administrator will try to fix the OST file by using tools provided by the Microsoft Exchange server. If the OST file is damaged beyond repair, they may try converting them to PST files so that all the data can be retrieved. There are many reasons why an OST file can become inaccessible and you may need to carry out an OST to PST conversion. Some of them are as follows:

·        It is not unheard of for email accounts to be accidentally deleted from the Exchange server. In such a case, all your data may be stored in the offline OST files that are more easily read if the OST file is converted to PST.

·        You may have accidentally deleted an email or some other Outlook item only to realize later that the mail was needed. The best way of recovering permanently deleted emails from the Deleted Items folder of the offline storage file is to convert OST to PST and then access the emails.

·        Finally, hardware failures or virus attacks can cause serious damage and corruption in OST files. Using advanced recovery tools such as Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen, you can restore almost all the data from the OST file. In fact, this tool can recover fairly large OST files and then split the output PST into smaller, more manageable files.