Microsoft Outlook is the most widely used e-mail client. It is a product from Microsoft and thus it is used the most on Microsoft networks and Microsoft operating systems. Microsoft Outlook is quite an old application which has gone through a series of enhancements in each of its new versions and still it is continuing to provide more and more to its users. Microsoft Outlook allows users to configure their e-mails accounts locally for downloading and sending e-mails. One can easily configure POP, IMAP, HTTP, and Exchange e-mail accounts. Since Microsoft Outlook supports Exchange so it is the first choice as an e-mail client.
Microsoft Outlook stores all its data in a file called as a PST file. This file contains all the mails, contacts, calendar entries and everything that you save in your Outlook thus the size of this PST file grows immensely during the course of its usage. All versions released before Outlook 2007 had a size limit to the PST files, but in version 2007 and later there is virtually no size limit. In older versions the irony was that Outlook never informed or stopped the user when file size grew beyond the specified limit of 2GB. Outlook works well even if the file size increases, but chances for this huge PST file to go corrupt are immense. Thus it is always recommended that you regularly check the size of the PST file and create a new one if the size of the default file goes beyond 2GB. But what if the file actually gets corrupt due to any reason? What happens to the data, mails, and contacts stored in it? Well the answer to these questions is that there are some chances for you to easily recover data from a corrupted file by fixing the errors. In this post I will discuss the method to fix a corrupted PST file using its own repair utility known as ScanPST.
Before we continue to the steps let me state that the ScanPST file is available only on those systems which have Microsoft Outlook installed on them. This file is located in default Microsoft Office folders and if you face any difficulty in finding the file then please search for scanpst.exe on your hard drive.
Step 1: Find and execute the ScanPST file.
Step 2: When the utility starts you need to click on ‘Browse’ and browse to the corrupted PST file. Please note that will be good if you create a copy of your original PST file and then run the repair to avoid any further issues of data loss.
Step 3: Once you have selected the PST file click on ‘Start’ button in the window to start the scan process process.
Step 4: Once the scan is done you can start with the repair process. This process happens in several phases and takes a long time depending upon the corruption and file size so please be patient while it runs.
