As the number of e-mails in your Microsoft Outlook grows, the Outlook takes more time to do what you want it to do. And, there is a lurking danger of PST overshooting the permissible size limit of 2 GB(if you are using MS Outlook 2002 or an earlier version). Therefore, you must discard the irrelevant or less important e-mails and other objects time-to-time in order to make your Outlook work more efficiently and to avoid PST corruption. This can be done by using the PST Archiving feature. You can create two or more PSTs, thus making data more manageable and easily accessible through Outlook. However, an archived PST can also get corrupt in various circumstances. Now, in order to retrieve data from an archived PST, you must repair it first by using Inbox Repair Tool. If this strategy doesn’t work in your favor, you should then consider using a professional pst repair software.

As a practical case, consider a scenario, wherein, you try and access an archived PST file stored on a network drive, and receive the following error:

“The file drive_letter:\archive.pst is not a personal folders file”.

Cause

The above error indicates that the archived PST file is corrupt. The archived PST could have got corrupted since it was stored on a network.

Explanation: A .pst file is a file-access-driven method of message storage, whereas, WAN/LAN use a network-access-driven methods. In case of file stored on a network, Microsoft Outlook tries to use the file commands to read from or write to the file, but the OS has to send the network commands. This results in an increase in the time of all the operations and slow performance of Outlook.

Moreover, if connection degrades or fails, it can lead to a corrupt .pst file.

Resolution

In order to overcome the problem, you must follow the below-mentioned outlook pst repair steps:

· Make a backup copy of the damaged archived PST file. And, repair your original damaged archived PST by using the Inbox Repair Tool (scanpst.exe)

If Scanpst.exe doesn’t address your needs, you must download a third-party pst repair software from the Internet. These tools employ sophisticated algorithms to extract data from a corrupt PST file.

Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair is a reliable and user-friendly software which repairs damaged or corrupt PST file in simple steps. Compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000, the outlook pst repair utility recovers and restores all PST file objects at a desired location.