Microsoft Outlook is a powerful organization and data management tool. It easily organizes your contacts, emails, tasks and more and is one of the most popular programs of its type.

Outlook uses PST files, to store and organize this data so that it is easy to access in a variety of ways and can be archived for long term storage. Since the PST file is the lifeblood of the information stored within the program, losing such data files could be a costly catastrophe.

One thing you can do to prevent the loss of your data is to create a .pst backup regularly which you can then use to replace a corrupt or unrecoverable file. Here we will show you how you can back up a PST file which is saved on your computer. These instructions are not for files which are stored on a Microsoft Exchange Server.

Locate the File

You will need to locate the PST file you want to back up. If you have created more than one .pst file, each file will need to be backed up separately. To locate your file go to the start menu and open the control panel. If it is not clearly visible you can open the RUN command and type CONTROL PANEL into the search box (see below).

?

Select OK. The Control Panel will appear. Navigate to USER ACCOUNTS and then to MAIL. You should see a box similar to this:

?

Click on ‘Data Files’. It will take you to a screen which outlines all of the paths to your Outlook Data Files.

?

The common file path is ‘Personal Folders’ by default. Select the Personal Folders path and select the ‘Open Folder’ button. This will open the folder which contains your PST files. These files should have the following symbol next to them ? and are identified as an Office Data File in the type field. Again, the most common storage file is outlook.pst.

Backup the File

Now that you have located the file, you want to create a backup copy of the file. To do this simply select the outlook.pst file and then choose ‘Copy this file’ to the left.

?

Choose the location you wish to copy the file to. This can be a removable storage device or another location on your drive. Do not save the backup copy in the same folder as it will conflict with the current file. It must be saved in a different location.

Now you have a backup copy of the data file should your original file become corrupt and you are unable to repair it.

You should backup your data files regularly. How often you make a backup copy will depend on your activity. Your backup copy will only have the data stored up to the point in time when you create the backup. Anything added to Outlook after that backup date will not be recoverable, so it is important to backup regularly.

The problem is that the Microsoft Office/Outlook installer places the repair program in hard-to-find locations. It also often makes it a hidden file. So make sure you search all your system files and you should be able to find it.

Inbox Repair Tool Errors

Another challenge people face is that this free tool does a poor job of fixing the errors and recovering all the data from an Outlook.pst or Personal Folders File, which is the single file in which all your email messages, contact records, shared items, appointments, journal entries, calendar events, alarms, schedules and other valuable information is stored. Because of that, there are several third-party PST repair tools available that do a much better job at PST recovery and repair.

There are known bugs that can cause things like an 0X80040600 error, or you might lose power and have your computer shut down while Office was in the middle of updating your email or contact records. Or your file might have grown larger than the 2gb file size limit some older versions weren’t able to handle. Or a bad bit on your hard drive could alter the encoding of the file, which is a database file under the covers, making it impossible for Outlook to read it properly.

Alternative PST Repair Tools

Even though we’d like to be able to say which is the best *.pst repair tool, and which ones are no good, you really have to try one or more of them yourself and see how they work for you. If you have a big file, the process might take a while. But if you data has any value to you at all, it might be worth the time, hassle, and expense to buy a tool that can repair the damage, recover your data, and reduce your file size.

The job of recovering data from corrupt files is extremely challenging and all the available tools have a price, although most do have a free download or trial version that will give you an idea of whether or not they will work for you. Here are a few that are worth evaluating:

• The Stellar Phoenix company has a great deal of experience in data recovery in general. They make a Stellar Outlook PST Repair program that you can download and evaluate. Stellar Phoenix Outlook includes a file splitting utility and a password recovery feature as part of their offering.
• Data Numen has also been around a while and makes a variety of data recovery products, including their Advanced Outlook Repair (AOR) tool. This appears to be the most expensive option, so be sure to read about it and download the free demo.
• Nucleus Data Recovery is another established vendor in the data recovery market. They are the creators of the Kernel for Outlook PST Repair Tool, which you can also download and try on your own. Kernel is available in three different licenses, depending on how many files you need to repair and whether or not you are in a corporate environment.
• The Disk Doctors have a tool called the Outlook Mail Recovery Program with a downloadable demo. However, they don’t appear to offer any refunds, so make sure you evaluate this one fully.

If you have any suggestions for improving this website, please contact us. We really appreciate your help and wish you the best of luck with the Inbox Repair Tool.

Google Adsense and the DoubleClick DART Cookie
Google, as a third party advertisement vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site. The use of DART cookies by Google enables them to serve adverts to visitors that are based on their visits to this website as well as other sites on the internet.

To opt out of the DART cookies you may visit the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following url http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html Tracking of users through the DART cookie mechanisms are subject to Google’s own privacy policies.

Other Third Party ad servers or ad networks may also use cookies to track users activities on this website to measure advertisement effectiveness and other reasons that will be provided in their own privacy policies, PSTFile.org has no access or control over these cookies that may be used by third party advertisers.

Collection of Personal Information
When visiting PSTFile.org, the IP address used to access the site will be logged along with the dates and times of access. This information is purely used to analyze trends, administer the site, track users movement and gather broad demographic information for internal use. Most importantly, any recorded IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Links to third party Websites
We have included links on this site for your use and reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites. You should be aware that the privacy policies of these sites may differ from our own.

Changes to this Privacy Statement
The contents of this statement may be altered at any time, at our discretion.

If you have any questions regarding the privacy policy of PSTFile.org then you may contact us here.

Whether we’re talking about Outlook 2003, XP, Vista, or even the newest version, Outlook 2010, every version of this program from the very beginning stores all of its information in a single file, commonly called a Personal Folders File. This file resides on your local hard drive, is often named Outlook.pst, and is used to store every piece of email you receive, every calendar item you create, every task you schedule, note you take, etc. (Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts.) Whether you get your email using a POP3, IMAP, or HTPP (Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail) account doesn’t matter. Once Outlook retrieves your mail it needs somewhere local to store it and that’s what the PST file is for.

As you can imagine, the longer you use Outlook, and the more email and other information you accumulate, the bigger your outlook.pst file will grow. In some ways this is a good thing as it reduces the burden on email servers, such as the ones supplied by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), which often impose limits on how much you can store. But in other ways this isn’t so good as Outlook’s very own storage file can grow without bounds and end up having issues.

PST File Corruption

In fact, early versions had a problem if the .pst file grew larger than 2 GB. Once that happened, Outlook could no longer open the file and there was a good chance you would have to truncate the file (using Microsoft’s PST2GB tool) and lose some of your data. Then, beginning with Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, the PST data file format was modified to no longer have a fixed size limit (although it defaults to a maximum size of 20 GB), and to work better with multilingual Unicode data (essentially, foreign language content).

While this new file format is an improvement, Outlook still suffers from the fact that as a PST file is essentially a binary database format, rather than a simple text file, it is prone to corruption damage that can render the file unreadable. (For example, attempting to read the file over a network connection is specifically unsupported by Microsoft and known to corrupt pst files.) When that happens, you will either see error messages and/or Outlook will no longer be able to open the Outlook.pst file. And you’ll have to repair the damage using scanpst.exe or a third party utility.

It goes without saying that any file that is this important should be backed up regularly. Unfortunately, many users of Outlook do not have a recent backup of their personal folders file. If that’s the case, do not panic. Reacting in haste will only make things worse. If you suspect your Outlook.pst file is corrupt, or Outlook is reporting an error, the first thing you should do is exit the application. Then, you should locate the Outlook.pst file on your local hard drive and make a backup copy of it, either on the same drive, a flash drive, a writeable CD ROM, or a backup drive. If any of the subsequent steps should fail, you can always restore your backup and be no worse than where you are now.

How To Repair PST Files

When you suspect corruption of your Outlook PST file, you should back it up, then run scanpst.exe, the free Inbox Repair Tool from Microsoft. Unfortunately, this utility is rather weak in what kinds of errors it is able to repair, and how much data it is able to recover. But since it is free it is still the best place to start. Don’t download scanpst.exe from the Internet as it comes with Microsoft Office and needs to match the version of Office you have installed on your computer. Simply search your computer for “scanpst.exe” and you should be able to find it.

If the Inbox Repair Tool was unable to fix all the damage or resulted in a loss of your valuable data, then your next step is to find a third-party utility that can do a better job on your particular file. Unfortunately, there simply are no free tools on the market. The job of recovering data from corrupt files is extremely challenging and all the available tools have a price, although most do have a free download or trial version that will give you an idea of whether or not they will work for you. Here are a few that are worth evaluating:

• The Stellar Phoenix company has a great deal of experience in data recovery in general. They make a Stellar Outlook PST Repair program that you can download and evaluate. Stellar Phoenix Outlook includes a file splitting utility and a password recovery feature as part of their offering.
• Data Numen has also been around a while and makes a variety of data recovery products, including their Advanced Outlook Repair (AOR) tool. This appears to be the most expensive option, so be sure to read about it and download the free demo.
• Nucleus Data Recovery is another established vendor in the data recovery market. They are the creators of the Kernel for Outlook PST Repair Tool, which you can also download and try on your own. Kernel is available in three different licenses, depending on how many files you need to repair and whether or not you are in a corporate environment.
• The Disk Doctors have a tool called the Outlook Mail Recovery Program with a downloadable demo. However, they don’t appear to offer any refunds, so make sure you evaluate this one fully.

If you have any suggestions for improving this website, please contact us. We really appreciate your help and wish you the best of luck with your outlook.pst file.