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Recover Crucial Exchange Data from Local OST Files

Let us assume that you work in an office that has many Exchange servers. Now, if one of the Exchange servers starts to give trouble - backups may start to fail and the entire environment becomes unstable - then you might believe that the problem is due to a corruption in the database. Naturally, you want to ensure that there is no data loss and start moving the data stored on that particular Exchange server to another stable server. You then take proper backups of the data and after fixing the server try to move the data back. However, due to some problem the server containing the mailboxes crashes and all the data becomes corrupt. You might believe that you can restore the data from the backups but as we will see this solution does not work and you may have to resort to ost to pst conversions to protect Exchange data.

You may use some of the more technically advanced applications to take backups of all your vital Exchange data. However, the fact remains that most of these backup and recovery tools cannot restore the data from the backups if the mailboxes from which the backups were made have been moved since the last backup. You might therefore wonder how one should be prepared for such a scenario. This where the Offline Folders File feature of Outlook can be taken advantage of. Users who have mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange Server should make sure they have offline copies of their data stored in Offline Folder files or OST files. Next, they can export these contents into Personal Folder files or PST files that Outlook can directly access. After this ost to pst conversion, you can easily make backups of the PST files. You can now delete the corrupted database and start afresh by importing the PST files that had been previously created.

If you find that you have to restore Exchange data from the local OST files, it is very important that you know how to do things and in what order you have to perform each task. The first and foremost thing you have to bear in mind is that the local OST files are tied to the user's profile associated with the mailbox on the Exchange server. Even if the Exchange database storing all the information is corrupt, you should not delete it till all the contents of each mailbox has been downloaded into OST and you have converted ost to pst. If you happen to delete the database containing the mailboxes before you complete these tasks, Outlook will simply connect to the new mailbox that has been created. This in turn will make the old OST file complete unusable.

If you forget to follow the steps in the order as mentioned above, chances are that you will be left with a damaged or orphaned OST file. Even then, you should be able to use sophisticated recovery tools such as Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen to easily and quickly repair the OST file to recover the lost data.

One Response

1. Trackman Fitting on December 6, 2011:
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