Help.. lost all my mail

[vixpy1]

I had a system fail this afternoon, put the XP disk in and ran chkdsk which fixed the problem.

Came back into windows, and my outlook .pst file is now 0Kb.. oh no!

I seem to have a new partition, but i cant access it, is this where chkdsk has put my .pst file?

Help.. :yikes:

[aldi]

You *could* try looking in the root of your c: drive for files ending in *.chk, and any new folders with strange names, or names like 'recovered files' (can't actually remember what it calls them, but its something like that) but basically look for a file about the right size to be your PST file. Rename it back to outlook.pst and try to open it... you might get lucky.

[Vipers]

For whats it worth, if you are having trouble accessing your emails, and sounds like you are, you can try going to www.mail2web.com (just to clarity thats mail figure 2 web dot com) and you should be able to access your email, and send from there until you fix it..

[vixpy1]

Thanks Vipers, but i copied over a backup .pst from another PC and we are email ready again.

From research it seems that you can't recover the .pst file when it goes to 0kb.

This backup is 9 months old, lost all my business emails and personal emails for that time..

which is a real pain, but totally my fault

[_dobbo_]

Ouch..

Can I recommend a switch to IMAP instead of POP3? That way any failure on Outlook wont result in lost mail as it's all stored server side.

It also means that if you want to you can access your mail from any PC with a mail client, not just your own PC.

[GreenV8S]

I work on the principle that any computer disk can fail completely at any time - because they can. How inconvenient would that be for you? Software can be reinstalled but data is often irreplaceable. If the data is precious/valuable you should probably have some sort of backup system in place. For example at home I use a Maxtor 250GB external disk drive, the drive has a button on the side that triggers an incremental backup, so easy even I can cope with it.

[aldi]

Did you look for recovered files in the c: drive? If the file descriptor for the file became corrupt, chkdsk would give the file a new name and save it in the root or in one of the folders I mentioned, then outlook would create a new 0KB file when you open it. If you get the properties of the 0KB file, what's the file creation date?

[vixpy1]

The file creation date at the moment is Jan this year, when i switched PC's.

I have run recovery software on the PC and none of the .chk files are more than 50k or so.

[tycho]

_dobbo_ said:

Ouch.. Can I recommend a switch to IMAP instead of POP3? That way any failure on Outlook wont result in lost mail as it's all stored server side. It also means that if you want to you can access your mail from any PC with a mail client, not just your own PC.

Or possibly a Gmail account with all messages left on server and can get to it from the web.

I have a few invitations should you need one.

[BliarOut]

Get a copy of Restorer2000. You can download a trial version from the web and see if your old .PST is lurking around on disk before buying it. the full version which can restore files larger than 64K is about twenty sovs.

[vixpy1]

It could'nt find it