Microsoft Exchange Saves the Day

Nowadays we all seem to live in email and within our email is all that we need to survive in civilized life. We save the emails with directions, phone numbers and maps to people's houses. We have our family photos trapped in each of those email messages just waiting for us to forward to someone. But what happens when we have an email crisis? What happens when things go wrong? I recently had that situation and thought to my self... "Oh crud...now what do I do?" It was not a pleasant thought. Here is my story, hopefully it can help you recover your email when that day comes.

I will start by setting up the scenario for you as there are some particulars that need to be explained in the beginning. For starters I am running a small business so I run the Microsoft Server product called Exchange Server. This server application takes care of my business email, and I even have my personal email saved onto the Exchange Server to make it easy to manage. For home users you will not have an Exchange server, but this will apply to work. I use Outlook to read, view and write email, and I do find that a large number of people (even at home) use Microsoft Outlook for their email. The major difference is that I am storing my email onto the Exchange Server, whereas you are storing your email normally into a PST (Personal Store File) that is located onto your hard drive.

Even if you are using a PST file, Out look also creates a backup files called the outlook.OST file. This is located under your profile. Even though my email is stored onto the Exchange Server I have an .OST file called outlook.OST. This is in case I am offline or to help buffer my email when the Exchange Server is too busy to process email requests. It is with this file where most people will be trying to restore their email.

I feel that I must give a little history concerning the PST file. Originally this file could not be larger than 2GB in size, and this was never a problem until again we keep all those photos, etc in our email. After 2GB the file would not work correctly and was prone to have other issues. So most people made sure their PST file was always under that 2GB cap. Over time the 2GB cap went away and it was just recommended to stay under that size. Even though, again I am not using a PST file and storing my email on the server, you will see how this original size limitation plays into email recovery in just a little bit.

I bet your wondering what got me into trouble with my email. Well it all started when I wanted to set an auto archive on a particular folder within email. I have a spam folder, like we all do and I was getting tired of deleting things. Therefore, I was setting up an auto archive rule to delete all emails that were older than 30 days. Some of you are guessing where this is leading too. Well my Archive rule started to go to work, but with one glitch. It was going through all my email folders. Which for me is a lot as I have just fewer than 3 GB of email in my inbox and sub folders. Yes, I probably should clean it out from time to time and I do, but there are a number of things, just like you, that I want to be able to find quickly.

Anyhow, this auto-archive was killing off my email faster than I knew and I had it set to automatically delete permanently. Oh joy; as I was watching my email go away I was contemplating what I could do to stop this action. Finally, I killed off the outlook process and stopped Outlook from processing any more deletions.

I then went to my profile and made a backup of the OST file in hopes that I might be able to salvage some emails from this file. Again this is just a backup file of what I have on the Exchange server or in your case the PST file. Because these items are synchronized and synching them can take time I might be lucky in restoring from the OST file.

I now have a backed up version of my OST file and now need to find a utility to convert from OST to PST. Outlook can only import a PST file and not an OST file. So as I began to search around on the Internet I am finding all kinds of utilities, but who knows which one to use. They all range in price from $50.00 to "we give you a bid;" which is never good news. I choose the $50.00 version as it seemed that most people were having the most success with that one, and the price was not horrible.

There are a number of utilities out there that claim to restore OST files. Read the web sites carefully. I ended up using "Recovery Tookbox for Outlook." This utility was easy to install and use. I found the price to be fair for what the product offered.

Remember how I said that the 2GB limit would come back to haunt me later on, well when I tried to recover my OST file it was able to create two new PST files with what it could recover. The first file was just over 1100MB and the second was almost 900mb. All in all, I was able to recover just about 2GB of email. The rest, well it seems that might be lost forever; until I found another solution that saved my email.

Before I get into my solution, I wanted to talk about your PST file. If your PST file is larger than 2GB you can archive part of it to another PST file. You can have multiple files open at one time, so you can always go back and find the saved emails. I personally like to burn them to DVD's so I have a copy that I know will be accessible. I do have to copy the file from the DVD disc to a local hard drive to access the file, but this way I know that the information is safe. Once I found what was looking for I just remove the PST file from my hard drive, and store the DVD disc into a safe location.

Now for my solution... drum-roll please...The standard installation of Exchange server automatically saves any emails that you delete for seven days, even if it what is called a hard delete, meaning deleted from the deleted folder. So if you deleted an email and you need to get it back by default you have seven days. This is a setting that your email administrator might change, so it could vary from what you have at work. The default is seven days, but they could set this to 1 day up to a year or more. Most administrators would set this to a maximum of a month due to log file sizes.

What you need to do is enable this capability. To do that, follow these instructions:

Open the registry editor

Locate the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options

On the edit menu, click Add Value

Add the following value:

Value Name: Dumpster Always On

Data type: DWORD

Value Data: 1

Close the registry

Close Outlook and reopen Outlook

When you go to tools in Outlook you will have an option called: "Recover Deleted Items"

Go to the folder that you have items that need to be restored and click on the "Recover Deleted Items" option under tools. Another box will open up with the items that you can undelete. You can pick individually or select the entire contents and then click on the icon that has the picture of email with a little circular arrow. This will restore the items that you selected.

I was lucky, as I was just under the seven days and was able to restore my email. I found that it took about 3+ hours for my Exchange server to synch back up with the backup OST file. For me this was a life saver, and just another way that my Microsoft Exchange Server has saved the day!