HELP: outlook.pst 2GB problem

[DocFaustus]

One of the ladies where I work let her .pst file for outlook exceed 2GB. At this point, Outlook can no longer handle the file at all. Searching through MS's Knowledge Base, I found that this is a known problem. They made a program to specifically fix it. The fix is basically two steps; the first program truncates the file and then a second program fixes the errors created.

The knowledge base states that when using the truncation program, start by chopping off a small amount. If that works, try again chopping a smaller amount. If it doesn't work try chopping off a little more. I found (through multiple tries) that losing 50MB was the sweet spot.

Here is the problem: I got almost all of her emails back (incuding over 1GB if shit in her deleted items folder). Unfortunately, the two most important things to recover was here address book (about 1000+ entries) and her calendar. The address book has all the entries in it now, but not a single email address to go with the names.... useless. The calendar repeats every single entry that was in it for every day of the year onto every day of the year..... again useless. These two areas are the lifeblood of her job.

Does anyone know how to fix the original .pst file? Or better yet, is there a program out there that will let me edit a .pst file? if I delete her deleted items out of it, I should have more than enough space to recover everything else.

Thanks in advance

 

[bane remix]

You are right - this is a known problem with versions of outlook prior to version 2003 though.. I work at a company where we ran into this ALOT since we had alot of our employees running on pop - all their emails were going directly into their PST file..

Here is what we did to remidy the situation when it someone hit the 2gig limit.. First we would run scanpst.exe (do a search for that on the computer - its preloaded with the office suite) and see if that fixes any of the errors - this may take a long time to scan through so leave some cushin for time... If that doesn't work then we'll use a program called OnTrack EasyRecovery EmailRepair - this is designed specifically to repair PST files that have hit the 2 gig limit... the site is here

h**p://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryemailrepair/

It is not free software so you will have to purchase it - but it is definitley a wise choice... It has repaired all corrupted 2gig files that i have encountered...

We don't have this problem anymore because we've upgraded to Outlook 2003 which has a 32 terabyte PST file limit...

Hope this helps..

 

[DocFaustus]

We upgraded her to Outlook 2003, hoping that it would remedy the situation. Unfortunately it didn't help.

scanpst.exe would not succesfully run on it until after i used window's truncation utility. I have pretty much recovered all of her emails. Unfortunately, the address book and calendar are the important things and both are destroyed after truncating the file.

We are sceduled to move the entire office over to an exchange server within 2 months. But that will not help her get her lost data back.

I am thinking that I may be able to get lucky by taking a chunk out of the middle of the file or something, then repairing it. But, I do not know how to select what portion of the file to delete (the ms program takes it off the end of the file).

Any suggestions?

 

[bane remix]

Outlook 2003 does support PST files over 2 gigs - but they have to be in the Outlook 2003 PST file format for it to do so... if you try to open up her same PST file through 2003 which was created in say outlook 2000 or XP - then it will bomb out... what you can try to do is an export/import of the OLD pst file into a newly made PST file from Outlook 2003... If that doesnt work then i would suggest purchasing the program i suggested before - it's inexpensive and will save your ass - the bad thing with the Truncation tool is that once you truncate the PST file and then run a scan - it doesnt keep the hierarchy of the PST file - it makes a dozen or so folders called "recovered" and sticks all the mails in there.. unsorted and very aggravating...