System converted pst file to ost

[Chimmers]

I performed a disk defrag this evening. To my horror, I lost all of my
folders/emails in Outlook. I have ran searches under my user, I searched by
unhiding the files, etc and still cannot find the file. (There are other pst
files out there but they are not the ones I need.) There are ost files
showing up out there which I found odd as I do not work offline and have not
changed my exchange server information. Can someone please tell me what I
need to do to retrieve this information? Why would the system make this an
ost file?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully, I am in the wrong folder!!

 

[F. H. Muffman]

I performed a disk defrag this evening. To my horror, I lost all of my
folders/emails in Outlook. I have ran searches under my user, I searched
by
unhiding the files, etc and still cannot find the file. (There are other
pst
files out there but they are not the ones I need.) There are ost files
showing up out there which I found odd as I do not work offline and have
not
changed my exchange server information. Can someone please tell me what I
need to do to retrieve this information? Why would the system make this
an
ost file?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Hopefully, I am in the wrong
folder!!

Ok, lets clarify a few things.

First, I'm going to assume you actually are connecting to an Exchange
Server.

There are three possibilities for what you work with when you connect to
Exchange:

1) A PST. This is least likely. I mean, you have a server where mail
would get backed up. It takes a bit of effort to tell Outlook to download
your mail to a PST and remove it from the server.
2) Nothing. When you run Outlook in non-cached mode, there is no local
copy of the information (afaik). All the data is on the server.
3) An OST. If you work in cached mode, regardless if you ever work offline
or not, you get an OST.

Now, all that said, unless you went through the steps to tell Outlook to
download all the messages from the Exchange server, then all the mail is
still on the server. Just reconnect to the server.

Defrag won't change a pst to an ost.

Now, if you *did* go through the steps, now you know why you shouldn't have.
I'd bet your Exchange server is backed up nightly. I bet your workstation
is not.

And if your server isn't Exchange, what type of server is it? IMAP? POP?
Hotmail? Gmail?

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

An OST file would be created when the following is true...

* Using Outlook 2003/2007
* Connecting to a Microsoft Exchange 2003/2007 server
* Enabling the cached mode setting

Never heard of a disk defrag causing a PST file to up and just disappear. I
have heard of antivirus software quarantine/deleting PST files in error.

Other than that, Outlook does not convert PST to OST files or vice versa.

 

[jessewalter]

OST to PST converter tool
OST recovery software is the most efficient tool to convert Outlook OST file to PST file. The software successfully recovers all the components of . ost file such as emails, contacts calendar entries, attachments etc. The tool is able to convert OST file to working PST file in any instance of corruption.
Hope this helps you.