Restore OST Emails Either Manually or Externally

Microsoft Exchange Server is most commonly used Mail Server by many organizations to manage the mails centrally. OST is the Offline Storage files for Exchange server. Moreover, it is the exact replica of the mailboxes that reside in the server. These OST files help the user to work offline and later get synchronized with the server. Later, this synchronization gets reflected in the server mailbox also.

The mischievous activities such as database corruption or server crash can happen with the server so that the mailboxes are destroyed. Even though the OST files exist at client side, these files cannot be accessed without corresponding mailboxes at server. However the OST files fragile and can easily get damaged. So, to restore OST emails we require either manual or external solutions.

Is it Important to Restore OST emails?

Here comes the question whether to restore the emails from Corrupt OST. Yes, it is important to recover the OST files. OST holds mails, Calendars, tasks, journals, etc that can be the core important documents for the organization. Sometimes these may me our personal documents. Losing these documents may affect the day to activities of the firm. So, let’s see how we can restore these OST emails.

How to Restore OST Emails?

Microsoft supports some inbuilt tool for repairing and recovering corrupt OST emails. OST integrity check is a free tool provided by Microsoft. Scanost.exe helps to fix various synchronization issues and other errors occurring in the OST files. Let’s see how scanost.exe works. Is it capable restoring OST emails? This method is briefed here.

1. Exit the application Outlook running on your system.
2. Find the default utility scan.exe from your PC.

The default location of the scanost.exe is (for Windows 7)
C:\User\user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\scanost.exe

3. Select profile, where the corrupted OST exists
4. Click connect
5. Then, click repair errors
6. Begin Scan on the OST files

This utility scans and fixes the errors automatically. This is a freeware which comes along with outlook. There are certain limitations to its capabilities. This tool is not capable of fixing major corruption issues in OST. The tool does not work if the Server is unavailable to the local computer. If you are looking for a smart solution to recover the corrupt or inaccessible OST emails take the helps of any external solutions.

Note: Scanost.exe is not available with Outlook 2010, 2013 and 2016 versions.

External Solutions

If you have highly corrupted OST files and looking for a solution, try out OST Recovery Tool. This tool is capable of recovery any kind of OST files; moreover, it allows you to change OST to PST Outlook 2010. It is a standalone tool which helps you to restore OST emails without altering any of its meta properties. Tool helps you to migrate your OST emails to various formats like PST/EML/MSG. Tool is compatible with all versions of Exchange server. The tool recovers all the emails even though the mailboxes are missing from server or server is not connected to the local system. The tool enables you to change OST to PST so that you can store emails for further references.