Find Out How to Repair Damaged OST File By Retaining Data Originality

MS Outlook comes as a part of MS Office suit and a well renowned email application. Being a flexible and reliable platform it is employed for both personal and professional email communication. Data in Outlook like emails, tasks, calendars, etc. gets stored in two data files- PST and OST files. Although both these files have their roots in Outlook, yet they differ in their structure.

PST files are used to store all the data that we access in Outlook like emails, calendars, etc. A PST File consists of 2 sections- Header and data part.

On the contrary, OST files are used to save data when Outlook is configured with Exchange server in cache enable mode. To put it in a simple manner, OST files are used when a user wants to work in an offline mode. When the user gets online Outlook synchronize with Exchange server and all the information stored in OST file synchronizes with Exchange server. However, sometimes while synchronizing OST files get damaged and become inaccessible to utilize. In the following section, we will discuss the reason behind damage OST file and way to recover it.

Cause Behind Damaged OST File

The most common issues in OST file arises at the time of synchronization. Any mishap at the time of synchronization of OST files with Exchange server may lead to corruption of OST file data. The synchronization issues may arise due to power failure at the time of synchronization of data. Moreover, if the Exchange server is down for some purpose, it may lead to synchronization issues. Additional problems such as virus attacks, malicious software, and network fault may render OST files inaccessible and results in damaged OST files.

Techniques to Repair Damaged OST

There is a software namely, OST Recovery. It helps to repair damaged OST file and convert OST to PST as well as it to desired file formats, i.e. EML, and MSG accordingly. It is designed in such a way that it maintains the data integrity after repairing the data. It does not requires Outlook installation to perform the procedure. It repairs unlimited files and supports all Windows editions. It generates a report after recovering the data and stores it in CSV file format.

Apart from this, there is another way, i.e. manual method to repair OST file. User can utilize an inbuilt repair tool, i.e. Scanpst.exe. It comes as a part of MS Office so there is no need be installed separately. It repairs all the damaged OST files stored in the system. However, this method has some limitations as it fails to repair highly corrupted data and consumes more time while repairing. It also results in data loss situation.

Conclusion

OST files are very prone of being damaged due to several reasons. To overcome the situation users utilize inbuilt utility but it fails to repair the highly corrupted data. Therefore, it is recommended to utilize third party utility, i.e. Microsoft OST Recovery. It saves users time and effort to repair damaged OST file.

Feriha is a blogger who provides articles mainly upon migration of one file format to another.