Thursday, February 16, 2012

Troubleshooting Outlook OST Error 'Errors have been detected In the File Outlook.ost'

For a real time collaborative messaging environment Microsoft Exchange Servers are deployed by end number of business enterprises all over the map. What Exchange administrators realize is that any sort of malfunction or Exchange Server failure can result in downtime that can prove to be disastrous for the organization. Even at the time of maintenance or upgrading the server to a higher version would require the Exchange to be brought down making all the user data inaccessible for the time being.

For a business enterprise it can be critical and lead to a great loss. Fortunately, Exchange OST files (Offline Storage Table) are available that can allow the Exchange users to work in the offline mode and serve as the replicas of user mailboxes stored on the local machine. This makes it possible for the Exchange administrators to bring down the server for maintenance or any other purpose without disabling all the access to the user's mailbox data. Once the Exchange Server is back online, the OST files synchronize with it and whatever work has been done offline gets updated onto the server mailboxes.

A banal error message encountered at the time when the Exchange OST file is accessed is:

“Errors have been detected In the File Outlook.ost”

Once you come across the aforementioned error message you loose access to emails, attachments, appointments, calendar entries, notes, tasks and journals. The appearance of this error clearly means that the Exchange OST file has become corrupt and no matter how many attempts are made to access the file, it would remain futile leading to cardinal data loss.

Resolve:

OST file corruption can result due to multifarious factors such as a virus attack, oversized OST, OS malfunction, hardware and software issues. Whenever a user is struck by the bolt of OST file corruption, the primary resolve turns out to be OST Recovery using the inbuilt utility Inbox Repair Tool (Scanost). Scanost.exe is the free utility by Microsoft that scans and repairs the corrupt OST file by completely restructuring the file and removing all the corrupt or unreadable items. This sometimes removes vital data from the OST file. Additionally, Scanost is not able to repair the OST file under severe cases of corruption.

The best resolve for OST file corruption is to devoir a professional third party OST Recovery Software that can successfully recover all the user data from the severely corrupt or damaged OST by using adavanced scans and mechanisms. One such powerful tool is “OST to PST Converter”. This adroit software recovers user mailbox data such as emails, attachments, calendar, contacts, notes, tasks, To-do lists and journals from the corrupt OST file by Converting OST to PST. The software is built with an interactive interface and comes with a step by step user guide that both regular and savvy Exchange users can operate easily. This preeminent OST Recovery Software is compatible with MS Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000.