Recovering missing/corrupted PST file

[crimlaw]

I am a lawyer in a criminal case in England and would welcome some help
with a question. A witness cannot produce emails for a particular
period. He is a government employee. I do not know what version of
Outlook he uses. He says that just after the relevant email traffic had
taken place, he moved offices and had to move his laptop onto a new
server. He had the relevant emails in a subfolder of his in tray. On
moving, he "had problems with the lap top and consequently the PST file
containing the mail was deleted and has never been found." A service
engineer has never been able to recover them.

How true is this likely to be? If the emails were autoarchived, would
they still be there? What if they were autoarchived onto the server?
Would a specialist be able to recover them now?

Urgent help please.

 

[William Lefkovics [MVP]]

This is reasonable and a regretable common occurrence. Outlook stores
content in .pst files and they can be deleted. Content that is autoarchived
in placed in a separate archive.pst file. It too can be deleted (or lost to
drive corruption or crash). Ideally, there is a backup somewhere,
especially if they autoarchived to a server location. Also, depending on
what the messaging server application is, they may have a mailbox on the
server or a log showing conversations and possibly content.

If the .pst file was recently deleted, an undelete application may be able
to recover it.
Otherwise, good engineers with the right equipment (and corresponding
budget) can recover data deleted from the hard drive.

Most likely, there are no guarantees to the recoverability of these deleted
..pst files. A lot of unknowns.