recovering data from an Outlook PST file

[spyordie007]

Our CIO has an enourmous PST file where he keeps archived e-mail from the past several years, today upon entering it he noticed it was completely empty (the folders were there but the messages were not). It appears as it would if someone were to go in and delete all the messages. At first I was thinking corrupt pst file however upon running scanpst.exe I was unable to find any errors with the PST (so the datastore doesnt appear to be corrupt). Of course his last backup of this file is over a month old 🙂|)...

My question is this, since the space is still taken up by the datastore until you do a compact does anyone know of a process by which I could recover anything of use from that pst file?

grumble, grumble, grumble

-Spy

 

[kranky]

See if this helps. I've never used this software but I've used their disk data recovery service and it was great.

 

[spyordie007]

That application appears to be geared tward recoverying corrupted outlook files however I dont believe the PST we have to be corrupted.

I wouldnt be surprised that he deleted them "somehow" and I'm more looking for a way to recover deleted items within the PST datastore or if this is even possible. I wouldnt be surprised if this was not possible but I thought I would see if anyone knows otherwise.

-Spy

 

[kranky]

It says it recovers deleted messages from Outlook files.

 

[spyordie007]

well thanks for the suggestion, I tried installing their trial version and it was able to "recover" what I already had (a whole bunch of empty folders) but was not able to recover any of the messages that had been in them.

-Spy

 

[kranky]

Too bad that didn't work. Check this page and try the idea that's all the way at the bottom of the page.

 

[spyordie007]

While I first started reading this I was afraid that it would be a "dead-end" however just like the last one suggested I opened it in a hex editor and blocked out those lines, ran it through a recovery program and voila! All of his e-mail is back, score +1 for the good guys!

Thanks for your help Kranky!

-Spy

 

[kranky]

You're welcome. Glad it worked, and tell your CIO what you just figured out how to do, would have cost him $2,000 at an outside company.