subject: How To Restore From Ost File After Deletion Of Mailbox? [print this page] Offline Storage Folder files commonly known as OST are considered to be the slave replicas of MS Exchange Server based folders. So its quite obvious that if you delete the master, the slave is orphaned. There are times when there is deletion of mailbox and you cant access data from OST file.
One can say that if there is no kind of modification in original MS Exchange profile, one can still start the Microsoft Exchange client offline with the old OST and recover the data by moving the messages from the OST to a PST file. On the other hand, if the Exchange profile is been deleted or modified anyhow (by using it to log onto a different mailbox) then the data in the OST is lost or it becomes totally inaccessible.
But not to worry, you can still recover mail stored in an OST, provided that you have not tried to modify the profile that was used to create the OST file. If the profile used to create the OST file has been modified to point to a new mailbox, the information contained in the OST file may be lost.
Reason for this issue
Security applied on an OST is the main reason. Windows NT authentication cannot be used to work offline in Exchange. Therefore, you must have valid Exchange Server authentication to log onto the server-based master before the OST file gives you local access.
Your Exchange Server profile stores the validation key for the OST. Every time you try to access the OST file it checks your profile for the existence of this key.
If you modify the profile or try to connect to a new mailbox or new server with the current profile, Microsoft Exchange replaces this key with a new value from the mailbox that was created. At this point, you cannot access the data that was contained in the OST created against the first mailbox. Here you need OST to Outlook software for saving the OST data.
Alternatively, following are the steps to copy the offline messages to a PST file. This method works only if you have not modified your profile or attempted to log on to the new mailbox.
Start the Exchange Client OFFLINE.
On the Tools menu, click Services.
Click Add.
Add a Personal Folders (PST) service.
Select the messages that you want to copy.
On the File menu, click Copy.
In the Copy to dialog box, select the personal folders (PST) that you created.
Click OK.
Repeat above steps for each folder that contains messages.
If your case is different and you are not able to convert OST to PST, then use efficient OST to Outlook conversion software to recover inaccessible OST file data.
