Effective Ways of Recovering Orphaned OST Files

Microsoft Exchange Server allows you to use your mailbox and other features to collaborate and communicate with many other users. You can use Outlook to manage emails not just on the Exchange server but also those downloaded on your local computer. One of the simplest ways of managing these emails without necessarily connecting to the server every time is to use Outlook in a Cached Exchange Mode. This particular feature allows you to store contents of your mailbox in the form of offline folders or OST files that you can access and work with even if you have no network connection. The changes that you make while offline will be communicated to the mailbox on the server the next time you establish a connection to the server. However, OST files are not ideal for backing up your server mailbox data. As we shall see, quite often, these OST files become orphaned and the only way to recover Exchange data from them is by converting ost to pst files.

Offline Folder files or OST files are just slave replicas of the mailbox stored on the Exchange server. Initially, all the data form the mailbox is saved in the OST files. You work with the Exchange data in the OST files even if there is no connection to the server. This helps if you have a poor or untrustworthy connection. The next time you establish a connection to the server, it authenticates that the OST file you are using is the one associated with the profile set up for the particular mailbox you are trying to access. After authentication, all the changes made in the offline content are synchronized with the data in the mailbox. If for some reason, the mailbox from the server is deleted and the corresponding Exchange profile also removed, then there is very little hope of being able to access data from the offline OST files using Outlook. The OST files are then said to be orphaned and one of the reliable ways of recovering information from them would be by converting ost to pst files.

You might wonder what would cause the deletion of an Exchange mailbox from the server. Sometimes, the server administrator or the user may delete the account by mistake. However, more often than not it may be removed as it was found to be damaged or corrupt. In such a case, you are more than likely to get synchronization errors. This essentially means that the mailbox no longer exists and you would not be able to access your OST data.

If you have stored and backed up your Exchange OST data in the form of PST files, then it is possible to restore the data by simply importing the PST file into Outlook. On the other hand, if you do not have any backup of the mails or the backup file is damaged, you might have to resort to more powerful applications such as Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen to convert ost to pst files and recover the data.