Outlook being one of the vastly used email clients is known for its flexible features and reliability for both professional and personal email communication. It even gives its users freedom to work in the absence of internet connection. When used in collaboration with Exchange server, the Outlook data gets stored in a file termed as OST (Offline Storage Table). Similar to other data files, these OST files are very much prone to corruption, which ultimately leads to inaccessibility of the data residing within the file.

In this blog, we will discuss the factors that are responsible for the corruption of these OST files. In addition, we will shed some light on the solutions that will help us to learn to restore emails from OST file without any data loss.

Role of Outlook OST Files

Outlook OST files are created in cache enabled mode when the users desire to work with Exchange server environment. The OST file is saved locally on the user machine and can be rightly considered as the replica of server items. This is because it contains a copy of all the data items that reside on the server.

When the user wants to work in an offline mode or is forced to do so due to internet connection unavailability, the OST files store the data that the user works upon in Outlook Once the connection is re-established, the changes done in the OST file data are updated on the server.

Glitches in OST Files

Although OST file proves to be of great help to work in an offline mode, few glitches can arise due to the corruption of these OST files. As OST files store data items like emails, contacts, calendars, etc. its corruption would mean inaccessibility of all these items. The various reasons, which play a major role in OST corruption, are as follows:

  • Interruption in the synchronization process is the primary reason for OST file corruption.
  • Virus and malware attacks often corrupt OST files.
  • Network issues in internet connectivity orphan the OST files.
  • Corruption of hard drive where OST is stored, damage the OST file.
  • Power surge causing sudden Outlook shutdown can lead to OST corruption.

Restoring Emails from OST File without Any Data Loss

There are both manual and third party solutions available for recovering and restoring data from corrupt Outlook OST files. We have discussed both the solutions to give you a better understanding:

Manual Solution

You can try repairing our corrupted OST file with the help of OST integrity check tool Scanost.exe. It is an inbuilt tool for MS Outlook that gets installed at time of Outlook installation. The availability of this tool was seized with Outlook 2010 version and is available only up to Outlook 2007 version.

The tool runs a check for corrupted sectors in the OST file and deletes the portions, which are corrupt. Although, this utility repairs the OST file but does the same at the cost of some data. Therefore, this utility increases the risk of data loss at the time of repairing.

Third Party Applications

Since the manual solution poses data loss issues, it is convenient to deploy third party tools for recovering data from corrupted OST files. One such efficient tool is SysTools OST recovery software. It recovers the entire data from corrupted OST file and stores it in the same format in a healthy PST file. The recovered data can be easily accessed afterwards in Outlook. It poses no concern of data loss and ensures 100% successful data recovery.

The Abilities of Our Tool

  • The software can be operated with high amount of ease and effortlessness
  • Backend interface of the OST2PST recovery tool handles the technological recovery of the OST files.
  • The conversion of the corrupted OST data files are done into MSG, EML and PST file formats according to the need and convenience of the users.
  • Scanning of the OST files is done by the tool automatically soon after loading the corrupted offline file
  • Support to all the versions of Windows operating systems as well as Outlook is provided by the tool.

You can restore your OST data files can be done even if your files are attacked by the most severe amount of the corruptness or deletion too. In addition, the users can preview the working of the tool with the freeware demo edition of the software.

The Bottom Line

Deploying third party tool is a wise choice than considering manual methods for recovering data from OST files without any data loss. It saves user’s time and effort as well to perform the data recovery in an efficient manner.