Messages disappeared from Personal Folders File

[Maurice]

Hello All,

One of our Outlook 2003 users maintains a PST file, to which he reguarly
saves old messages (from an Exchange server). He created subfolders in the
Deleted Items folder of the PST, then moved the messages into those folders
according to date. Well, he just noticed that for many of those subfolders,
the messages are missing. Not all of the folders are blank, but, most are.
He knows he didn't delete them.. and I'm thinking if he had performed an
'Empty Deleted Items' on the Deleted Items folder, it would have cleared out
all the subfolders (and other messages) beneath it as well. Now I did run a
PST scan on it and it found and repaired some errors, but, we didn't notice
any change. (To make matters even worse, we found that our oldest backup of
that file has the same problem). We also checked to see if the messages
were autoarchived elsewhere, or may have been moved accidentally.

Has anyone seen a phenomenom like this before, and/or know of any tools that
may help? Its certainly new to me, and I'm at a lost.

Thanks!
MJ

 

[Jocelyn Fiorello]

You can try some of the other suggestions for recovering data from a .PST
file at http://www.slipstick.com/problems/scanpst.asp. If your *oldest*
backup of the file has the problem, why not restore from a newer one -- or
did you mean to say your newest backup has the problem?

One more thing...ask him why he's storing important messages in a Deleted
Items folder. It's like storing your important papers in your office trash
can. Surely he can have another folder to store things that are probably
junk but "might" be needed later, and autoarchive that folder regularly to
clean out his system. Deleted Items should be used just to be able to grab
something back out within a short period of time in case it is accidentally
deleted...in other words, it's a fail-safe, not a long-term solution.