Last Sunday my Outlook .pst file crashed. Well, to be honest, the whole damn computer kind of broke down. And yes, its a Dell. I hate Dell but thats for another post … actually, I think I will dedicate a whole blog network at some point about how bad Dell is. For now, just don’t ever, ever, ever buy Dell! They really suck.

Anyway, I lost this pst file and anyone working on Outlook knows just how much of a nightmare that can be - so I’ll tell you about my experience and how I got most of it back with the magic of my recovery-fingers …. and a hammer …

Last Sunday I was checking emails (again) and as a mail came in from my good friend Anne Kennedy my Outlook just froze. I am not saying it has anything to do with Anne – it would probably have frozen anyway. Outlook freeze up now and then – that’s just part of the “joy” of using Outlook and we all live with that. Restart and move on. But not this time. It was more bad than usual. Outlook would (after some pst file scanning time) open but I was not able to read all mails, it was incredibly slow and I could not send or receive anything. What now …

First thing I did was trying to move the pst file from my old Dell to my new super nice IBM Thinkpad T43p that I just got. It just did not work. I got some strange error message about some “cyclic” thing – and what do I know? A geekier friend of mine explained that I probably had some “bad sectors” - whatever that is. Bad, bad , bad.

Then I tried exporting my emails from the Outlook on the Dell to a new file. However, I just got the same “cyclic” error saying it could not access the file.

After a bit of research I found out that Outlook comes with a little (well hidden!) tool called Scanpst that can be used to recover bad pst files. If you want to find it on your computer do a search for “scanpst.exe”. After a few hours of scanning the result came in: Error: Scanning not possible because of bad sectors (or something like that) – run Scandisk. Shit!

OK, so I went on with Scandisk. It took forever – several hours, well into the next day. Finally it was done – but with errors. Some bad sectors was apparently not repairable. Now what …
I went on with a defragmentation hoping that bad sectors might be moved to better sectors on the disc. Wow! I don’t think I have ever seen such a fragmented disc. There was one big red (fragmented) block taking up almost 1/3 of the disc. I guess that must have been my pst file. The defragmentation took forever. When it was done the report said that there was a few files it could not defragment – including was (off course!) my pst file. Damn!

After some more research I found a company that looked trustworthy with a solution for recovering pst files. Great! They even had a demo that could do the scan, to check if files could be recovered, and then I could pay the $129 the software cost. With all the time I had already spend $129 seemed like a good deal. So I downloaded it an started scanning. And I scanned, and I scanned. For 3 FULL days (over 70 hours!) it scanned away. Then I got suspicious …

The progress bar was moving fine but every time it got to the end it just started over, there was not button to stop the scanning and I was afraid what might happen if I just killed the application. So I wrote to the support of Stellarinfo. Shortly after (thanks for that!) they wrote back and told me that the software doesn’t work for Outlook 2003 and I should just kill the application. Fuck!

I do have a backup of my pst – but it’s 6 month old. I know, I know, I know – I should have made more regular backups but please be honest with me: Do you have everything perfectly backed up? OK, great for you!

So, I finally gave in and copied my 6 month old pst file to my new IBM Thinkpad. In a last attempt to recover, at least some of my emails, I tried to do another export from Outlook of specific and important folders. WOW! Somehow, between and the Stellar-scans, Skandisk scans, defragmentation and Scanpst something must have happened – even though they all said it did not work. Now I could suddenly export most of the folders I wanted: Inbox, sent box and my client boxes. I only got a few errors – it said some files was missing, but it did finalize the export. Now, the big question was: Are they valid and can I import them on my IBM?

YES! I got them in! Not everything is recovered but the far majority and just about everything important. I have absolutely no idea how I did it – only that it took me a little over a week.
Now I am going to reorganise my pst, make a backup on then – from now on, get a more regular backup schedule set up for my Outlook pst file. That’s for damn sure!