pst file repair question

[the]

Hey guys,

I was in the process of backing up a PST before moving the client to
exchange. During this process Mcafee decides to kick on, and locks the
computer in question, and the pst file is now showing limited emails, but
the whole subfolder structure. The pst is 605 meg, and no matter what i do,
i can "recover" about 110 megs of mail. I;ve run scanpst.exe, a few free
tools that claim to be able to read pst files. Regardless if i use one of
these pst readers, or outlook, it only shows me the 110 meg of mail. So my
question is, A> can there really be ~500 of dead space in the pst file, and
B> is there any real chance of me recovering these emails? The next step i
plan on taking is this
http://www.sparnaaij.net/howto/restoredeleteditemsfromanoutlookpst.htm
and after that im gonna resort to a peice of commercial software such as
this. http://www.repair-outlook.com/

Does anyone have any advice to give?

 

[Sean]

I would take a copy of the PST file and attempt to open it in Outlook.
If Outlook can open the message confirm with your user if everything appears
to be there. If it is just export the PST to either another PST or
preferably some on of the text format likes tab or comma delimated. Both of
the text formats will not bring over corrupt items and you can manually edit
the file if you need to before importing it into Exchange via Outlook.
If data is missing I would say you are probably out of luck at this
point.
You can have a large amount of empty space in a PST if a user has
deleted large numbers of items and then not run a database pack on the PST.
This will create a large amount of dead space in the PST file until a full
pack is performed.

Sean

 

[Brian Tillman]

I was in the process of backing up a PST before moving the client to
exchange. During this process Mcafee decides to kick on, and locks
the computer in question, and the pst file is now showing limited
emails, but the whole subfolder structure.

Why not go back to the original PST and make another copy? That should
still be intact.

By the way, when you say "backing up" instead of "copying" an alarm goes off
in my head. A backup of a PST IS just a copy. Were you doing something
other than just copying the PST?

 

[the]

I was copyinging it. However, I;ve found out now the real issue, the user
decided that he wanted all his mail on the mail server (we deployed an
exchange server for them and were slowly getting everyone up to the exchange
functionality) he took matters into his own hands and clicked and dragged
his mail from 'personal folders', to 'User - Mailbox' so essentially from
his computer up to the exchange server. During the moev he rebooted his
computer resulting in the pst file i now get to deal with. any hope at
recovering anything? Im guessing not.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I was copyinging it. However, I;ve found out now the real issue, the
user decided that he wanted all his mail on the mail server (we
deployed an exchange server for them and were slowly getting everyone
up to the exchange functionality) he took matters into his own hands
and clicked and dragged his mail from 'personal folders', to 'User -
Mailbox' so essentially from his computer up to the exchange server.
During the moev he rebooted his computer resulting in the pst file i
now get to deal with. any hope at recovering anything? Im guessing
not.

Well, some of the data should have made it to the server, so perhaps between
what's there and what remains in the PST, perhaps you have most of the data.
I don't have any other suggestions.

Perhaps, too, this will be painful enough for the person that he'll learn to
keep backups and to not shut the PC down when it's doing something he asked
it to do.