Learn How to Repair Corrupted PST files using Microsoft Utilities

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For any Microsoft Outlook user, a PST file corruption can be a cause of great anxiety. After all, if you are using it to store important personal and professional information such as contact details, appointments, emails, journals, notes and much more, the possibility of losing all this data is enough to give anybody sleepless nights. However, PST file corruption can, unfortunately, happen all-too-frequently for your comfort. You should therefore be prepared for such an eventuality by familiarizing yourself with tools and utilities that will help you recover data from a corrupted PST file. Microsoft Outlook provides two very valuable tools that you can use to recover Outlook data in such cases.

 

If you are planning on upgrading your operating system or the version of Outlook that you are using, it is possible that this could result in a corruption of the PST file. One option is to rename the PST file to something else and then after you have finished the upgradation, to rename them back to their original names. However, quite obviously this will prevent any further corruption of your PST files and does not do much to rectify errors that already exist in the PST file. You have to look at Microsoft utilities as well as third-party solutions to recover Outlook files.

 

The Inbox Repair Tool is fairly effective in fixing the PST file. However, the way this tool functions is as follows. It first examines the header of the PST file and tries to fix it. It then proceeds to analyze the data contained in the file ' it restores all the data that it understands; deleting data that it does not.  If only the header of the file is damaged, which is most often the case, this tool will very quickly restore the PST file. However, if there is any corrupt data in the file, the Inbox Repair Tool may end up destroying everything in the file. You are therefore always advised to make a backup of your present PST file before you start running the Inbox Repair Tool to recover Outlook data.

 

The other reason why your PST files may get corrupted is because these files very quickly grow in size. However, in some versions of Outlook, PST files have a maximum limit of 2 GB placed on them. This means that as soon as the PST file grows to 2 GB or beyond, the file immediately gets corrupted. This problem cannot be fixed with the Inbox Repair Tool ' you have to use the other Microsoft utility called the Oversized PST And OST Crop Utility. However, this tool is a little destructive since it first deletes about 25 MB of data and then tries to make the file available for Inbox Repair Tool to work on it.  Since you cannot control what data you might lose with this tool, in such situations, you should employ powerful applications such as Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen for a more careful and thorough recovery of Outlook data.