subject: Successfully Converting Outlook OST to PST Files [print this page] Successfully Converting Outlook OST to PST Files
You can easily take backups, ensuring that data is safe and use the same Outlook to work with OST and PST files. Our article looks at when and what are the best ways of converting OST to PST files.
While Outlook offline storage files are very convenient if you are working from home or traveling and want to access your mails stored on the Exchange server, they also pose problems because they are so intricately linked to the server. Even an accidental deletion of the mailbox from the Exchange server can cause local OST files to become orphans and the data stored in them inaccessible. It is therefore usually recommended that the best way of protecting the OST data would be to regularly import messages from the local OST files into a Personal Storage file (PST) which can be directly accessed by Outlook without any need for connecting to the Exchange server. By converting these files to PST, one ensures that even if the mailbox on the server is deleted, the Outlook data stays safe in the PST files.
It is usually easy to export messages from the OST files to a PST file and to import them back by using the 'Import and Export Wizard' provided by Outlook. You can use this tool to conveniently store messages from the local OST file into a PST file so that you can access the messages without fear of losing them and also take regular backups. However, there are times when this simple method of using the 'Import and Export Wizard' fails and you may need to use third-party tools to convert OST to PST.
Many factors can prevent you from converting some or all of the data from the local OST files to PST. For example, there can be sudden software failures, system shut downs, virus attacks and so on that can result in a corruption of the OST files. If you have not recently exported your messages from the OST file or have never done so, it is entirely possible that the OST files are now so seriously damaged that repairing them may be very difficult for standard Microsoft tools.
However, there are many powerful, third-party tools, developed after years of research that makes this recovery task very easy. For example, Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen uses one of the most sophisticated scanning technologies in the field today that enables it to locate data even in seriously corrupted OST files and convert OST to PST data.
It is very important that before you run a tool such as Advanced Exchange Recovery, you take a backup of the OST files to ensure that you do not lose whatever readable data is left in the file. Once you have a backup of this file, you can run the recovery tool on that file. Advanced Exchange Recovery can recover data from damaged OST files and then save them in PST files so that you can easily use Outlook to access them or export them later if you want. One of the biggest advantages of this particular tool is its ability to handle fairly large files and yet convert them into smaller, easily manageable PST files after recovery is done. Using Advanced Exchange Recovery, you can easily convert OST to PST, and be sure that all your OST data stays protected.
Product can be found at http://www.exchange-recovery.com/
