need help restoring pst file

[Guest]

My hard drive crashed and I had copied my outlook.pst to a backup drive. I'm
using OfficeXP and Outlook 2002. I've tried to use file-open-outlookdatafile
and point to my backed up pst file. When I do, it creates a second set of
personal folders and one extra folder shows up but nothing in my inbox or
sent messages. Am I doing it right and where did my inbox messages go?

 

[DL]

You have corrupted your Profile, create a new one, use mail applet in the
control panel.
How did you copy this pst? Have you run scanpst.exe on this copy?

 

[Guest]

I was able to read the pst file and it does not contain any of my inbox or
sent mail messages. The file size is very small compared to a backup I did a
few years ago! My hard drive was failing and I think by copying the file
over my most recent backup pst, I lost all my data. The file was probably
already corrupted when the drive was failing and I thought I was saving my
data by copying the most recent pst on my hard drive to my backup drive. I
actually overwrote a good file and could have had some information. As it
is, now I have none. Lesson learned. When I run scanpst.exe on the file, it
shows there are about 500 data items in there. Nowhere near what I had. I
can still access the failing drive and the only pst on there is the small
file. I am sad, that's for sure.

 

[DL]

Perhaps check your backup drive for *.pst to see if you have multiple files

 

[Guest]

I did and it's only the small .pst file. I'm sure when I was backing up for
the last time, I took my .pst file from my C drive (which was failing) and
copied it to my D. If I overwrote the file (it had the same name), is there
any way of restoring the previous version of my file (on the D drive)?

When my C drive was crashing, I had to restore XP in order to boot. Perhaps
it was then that the Outlook file was corrupted. The disc has many, many bad
sectors on it. I'd love to be able to go back to my backup drive and recover
a previous version of the file. But I don't know if that's possible.

 

[DL]

There no way of restoring an overwritten pst, though if the pst you copied
had all your mail on it, it should have remained intact, unless the copy
process corrupted it.

 

[Guest]

I'm guessing that when I restored XP, maybe it couldn't write onto the bad
sectors and found some good ones which may have contained my pst file. Who
knows. I just know that after I was able to read my drives again, I copied
the pst file to the backup drive. I didn't look at how big the file was but
if I had, I would have seen that it was very small. I should have copied it
to a new place and not over the latest pst file I had on that backup drive.
That would have been my last chance at a good file. If I can't recover a
previous version from my backup drive then I'm stuck with the small pst file
which does contain my contacts but no inbox or sent items.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I did and it's only the small .pst file. I'm sure when I was backing
up for the last time, I took my .pst file from my C drive (which was
failing) and copied it to my D. If I overwrote the file (it had the
same name), is there any way of restoring the previous version of my
file (on the D drive)?

If Outlook was open at the time you did the copy, that could explain the
lack of data in the copied file.