Working With Offline Folders Ost Files

By Author: John Weelson
Total Articles: 5
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Offline folders files aka OST files are just like Outlook's PST files except that they are used to work in offline mode. OST file is stored on your computer and are available even when the network is down. The default location for the .OST is your current Windows folder. Like personal folders .PST files, .OST files can be compacted to save space on your computer.
Both OST and PST files are of same importance. One comes to other's rescue in times of data crisis. But there is a basic difference between an .OST and a .PST file. .OST file starts as a mirror image of your folders on the Exchange Server, and works in conjunction with the Exchange Serve during synchronization. Whereas, .PST files is simply a storage location on your hard disk or a server other than the Exchange Server.
You can perform every operation of addition, deletion, modifying contents in emails and other email items in offline mode exactly the same way as you would do with a folder on a server. All this happens in OST file. For example, you can change and move items in your offline Inbox, send messages that are placed in your offline Outbox, and ...
... read your offline public folders. In the meantime, information on the server is still processing. You continue to receive new messages in your mailbox while other users can add, delete, and change items in public folders. However, it is to be noted that all these changes are not live until you connect to the network.
When you need to update the contents of the .ost file and its corresponding server folder so that they are identical, you synchronize the folders, and then continue to work offline. In Outlook 2002, this is done through Send/Receive Groups. Synchronization connects to the server through Dial-Up Networking, copy the changes made in each folder to the other folder, and then disconnect. An item that you delete from either the .ost file or the corresponding server folder is deleted from both after synchronization.
Following are the steps to work with Offline files .OST in MS Outlook.
1.On the Tools menu, click Send/Receive Settings, and then click Define Send/Receive Groups.
2.Click All Accounts, and then click the Edit button.
3.Click to select the folders that you would like available offline including any Public folders that you have in your Favorites folder.
4.Click OK, and then click Close.
When corruption erupts in OST files, you can't access your emails and other items existing in the file. Therefore in order to get back those emails, you need to perform email migration from OST to PST. Because migration from OST to PST is the only way to rescue your lost OST file. Once email migration software works, it converts all OST file items to PST file and you can once again work the inaccessible data. Convert OST to PST tool recovers data from corrupt OST files and saves them PST format so that the data becomes accessible with MS Outlook.

About the Author:-
John Weelson is a renowned writer, who has expertise in the field of data recovery software, email recovery, email migration, hard drive recovery and password recovery. The entire range of his articles is information-rich and useful for dealing with data recovery issues and finding suitable solution. See More.. email migration