| Microsoft Outlook is the de-facto standard | | | | failure to get you unprepared! |
| for office communication. A typical office | | | | |
| employee's entire workflow consists of tasks, | | | | Power outages, black-outs and brown-outs are |
| contacts, and email exchange in Microsoft | | | | becoming all too common. A UPS can save you |
| Outlook. But what happens if one day a system | | | | from power outages, firewalls can protect |
| crash happens, or a hard drive fails, or some | | | | against viruses and malware, and regular |
| malware targets and corrupts your Outlook | | | | backups will get you back on track if the |
| data? Does this mean the end of the day for | | | | unpredictable happens. But what if the backup |
| your entire office? | | | | is a few days old, and you're in the middle |
| | | | of something important? What if you cannot |
| Are you betting on the chance that corruption | | | | afford to lose several days of work? Consider |
| is unlikely to happen? Consider the | | | | repairing the corrupt Outlook database to |
| following. In a typical office environment, | | | | save you days of work! |
| Outlook PST and OST files that contain all | | | | |
| email, tasks, appointments and contacts are | | | | Outlook has a built-in recovery mechanism. If |
| the files accessed most frequently. Computers | | | | Outlook detects corruption in a PST or OST |
| read and write to these files all the time | | | | file, it rejects the file automatically, not |
| during the working day, except for the lunch | | | | allowing you to continue your work. |
| break. If there is one file that is likely to | | | | |
| be damaged or corrupted during a power | | | | Microsoft provides another level of recovery |
| outage, that would be an Outlook storage | | | | in the form of a special Inbox Repair Tool to |
| container. If Windows crashes at the moment | | | | recover corrupt databases called ScanPST.exe. |
| Outlook was accessing a PST or OST file, the | | | | It claims to recover corrupt Offline Folders |
| corruption will occur almost inevitably. If | | | | (*.ost) and Personal Folders (*.pst). |
| that happens, Microsoft Outlook will not be | | | | Unfortunately, this level of data recovery |
| able to access that data, and it will report | | | | can only cope with small problems, and |
| a corrupt database. | | | | frequently fails if more serious damage is |
| | | | done to the database. Even worse, sometimes |
| Modern hard drives are made to barely survive | | | | its recovery attempt produces files even more |
| through the warranty period. Chances of hard | | | | damaged than the originals. Microsoft warns |
| drive failure increase exponentially after | | | | that using that tool can result in data loss. |
| about 3 years of use. Don't let a hard drive | | | | |