Recover Lost Mails From Outlook Offline Folders

By Author: nucconverter
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What would you do if you realize that there is some serious problem occurred with the Exchange Server and everyone in the organization has lost their emails for the past week? All your meeting notices, appointments, messages and emails sent/received have gone without a trace of single bit of data. It might happen due to power failure, when the IT experts are not able to shut down Exchange in time. This power fluctuation corrupts the master database, prevents Exchange from backing up the data. After innumerable attempts to perform Outlook PST repair with use of Exchange database recovery tools, it is determined that tape backups are the only way to recover data lost for the last week. And what if there were no backups made for last few weeks; well things are going to get worse.
Well, little can be done for data saved on Exchange Server but users who took advantage of Outlook's Offline folders still have a decent chance of recovering their lost data. As you all know Offline folders allow you to work on mails even when you are offline and the changes can be updated the next time you connect through synchronization. Therefore, ...
... those users who shut the system normally can easily recover their data, if they could get their offline folders. This will help them recovery previous week's emails. Here is the three step process, to recover emails without performing Outlook PST Repair .
1.Don't synchronize- Make sure that you have not synchronized the offline folders during synchronization; Outlook deletes data from offline folders. Now if you have already connected to the damaged Exchange server, don't close Outlook as it will try to synchronize. Prevent this by going to Mail Services tab of Options dialog box. To do so click Tools > Options > Mail Services tab. Now make sure that none of the synchronization boxes are checked.
2.Work Offline- The next step is to start Outlook in offline mode and make sure Outlook prompts to select the connection state when started. This setting can be found in Microsoft Exchange Server properties box. To enable this setting go to Tools > Services, select Microsoft Exchange Server and click the Properties button. Now select the Manually Control Connection State option. This step will depict whether the offline folders were synchronized or not. If they were not, the next step will surely help you recover your emails. Select Work Offline and you will check your email from previous week present there.
3.Shift your lost mails to desired location- Now that you have recovered mail from offline folders, quickly create a new subfolder. Since the folder is created while working offline, the folder and its contents would get copied to the server the next time you connect to Exchange Server.
The above mentioned scenario will work with only those users who worked on offline folders and therefore, not for those who didn't used offline folders. In many network environments, usually laptop user's work with offline folders as they often use Outlook when they are not connected to the network. Therefore, the above scenario suggests that desktop users can also benefit from using offline folders. As for those who do not use offline folders and lost their data, can try performing outlook pst repair and bring back their lost data easily.