# Outlook 2003 - Inbox contents and subfolders have vanished!



## computertechie (Jul 10, 2007)

A user has a problem where they came into work this morning and the entire contents of their inbox had vanished. It was there when they left the office last night. It's as if someone broke in last night and did a permanent delete on the inbox. And like the majority of people using POP3 email, they don't have a backup of their pst file.

The only data that remains in Outlook is their Sent Items and their contacts.

If I take a look at the pst file in the Outlook folder it is 900MB.

But, if I do an export from Outlook to a pst file it only comes to 450MB, which is the same size as the sent items folder.

I took a backup of the 900MB pst file and ran the scanpst utility on it. I also tried opening the pst file on my computer. Neither resulted in us being able to see the inbox contents.

Surely that inbox data must be in the 900MB file? Or else it would only be 450MB in the Outlook folder?

Any ideas? Is there another free tool that I can use?


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## TheEmperor (Feb 26, 2008)

Have you checked in ALL of the subfolders in his personal folders, including the deleted items, any archive folders, etc...? Many times we have had users accidentally drag their inbox to weird places and not be able to find it again.


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## Bob Cerelli (Nov 3, 2002)

Is Outlook configured to use the correct PST file?


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## computertechie (Jul 10, 2007)

Yes, we've checked the whole folder structure. Nothing there. The user didn't do anything, it was just gone when they loaded Outlook as per usual in the morning.

Yes, it's using the correct pst file.


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## Abdul (Jul 8, 2007)

search scanpst.exe in your c:\ . After you locate that scan your existing pst file.

This may help you in restoring your mails.


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## computertechie (Jul 10, 2007)

Already done that. I've put a copy of the 900MB pst file onto my laptop and run scanpst on the copy as well. I then open it, but the inbox items are still missing.

I'm convinced that the missing data is within that pst file. Question is how to get it?


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## Bob Cerelli (Nov 3, 2002)

Scanpst.exe is pretty basic and limited in it's ability to recover from a damaged PST file. There have been numerous times where I've needed something that works better. But then it wasn't free. 

Also, why don't they have backups of important files? It's pretty easy to do with Outlook since you can store the pst file where you like. Typically I have my customers keep theirs on a server where it is backed up to multiple devices every night.


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## computertechie (Jul 10, 2007)

Is there a utility you could recommend? Be it free or paid-for.

As for them not having backups, it seems to be the norm for small businesses to just keep their pst files in their default location and not even consider doing a backup. They don't have a server where they can keep them all in one place.

But I've done this sort of thing in a company before, but so many people leave Outlook open at night, so their pst doesn't back up. Or Outlook is closed and doesn't backup anyway.


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## Bob Cerelli (Nov 3, 2002)

Wow...can't believe it is a norm for small businesses not to have backups. All of mine do. Don't even need a dedicated server to have decent backups. Guess they can't complain when they lose data. The cost is pretty much nil compared to the information lost. Heck, there are terabyte external drives selling for under $300 !!!

One program I've used to recover damaged PST files is Easy Recovery Pro.


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## stormyonell (Dec 3, 2007)

Right click on the inbox and choose properties.
Click on folder size. That will show you if there is content that you con't see, since you suspect that to be the case. Also, check the home page tab. If Show Home Page By Default For This Folder is checked, and pointing to a blank or corrupt page/document the inbox will appear empty. 

Is it possible the items were archived? Maybe somehow the auto archive was set to archive everything older than one day?

Can you create a new .pst and try to import the inbox from the old one?


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## computertechie (Jul 10, 2007)

There was no archive on the system.

If I look at the sizes of the folders, they are as follows:

AVG Virus Vault 0 KB
Calendar 0 KB
Contacts 10 KB
Deleted Items 242 KB
Drafts 0 KB
Inbox 26 KB (a couple of emails came in after everything vanished)
Journal 0 KB
Junk Email 0 KB
Notes 0 KB
Outbox 0 KB
Sent Items 497038 KB
Tasks 0 KB

Total size - 497,354 KB


And the actual size of the pst file (when you are looking in the Outlook folder) is 923,145 KB.

So that leaves 425,791 KB unnacounted for. Which would be about the size of their inbox and sub-folders.

I did try a trial version of Ontrack PowerControls (Easy Recovery Pro) earlier, but all it could see in the inbox was just the 2 emails.


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## stormyonell (Dec 3, 2007)

computertechie said:


> Total size - 497,354 KB
> 
> And the actual size of the pst file (when you are looking in the Outlook folder) is 923,145 KB.


Is it possible the .pst Outlook is opening is not the same one that you see in the Outlook folder?

Have you compacted the .pst?
This might not be a good idea, because it lessens the success of any recovery tools working, but I was thinking maybe you are seeing such a file size difference because when large amouts of data are deleted from the .pst the file size does not actually get much smaller until you compact the file. Possibly the messages were deleted. It's a thought but I doubt that much unused space could be showing up in the file size.

By the folder sizes, they messages sure are not in the inbox anymore.

I wonder if maybe the emails were moved into Outlook Today? The same as the inbox, if a home page is set (which it is by default) you won't see the messages. You can check the same way, right click on Personal Folders, go into properties and uncheck the home page. See if they show up there.

Maybe the header is collapsed? If they were filed under "Older" and it is collapsed the user may not see them.


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## Bob Cerelli (Nov 3, 2002)

computertechie said:


> There was no archive on the system.
> 
> Total size - 497,354 KB
> 
> And the actual size of the pst file (when you are looking in the Outlook folder) is 923,145 KB.


It is not uncommon for the folder size and the file size to be different. It most often means that the file has not been compacted.

But again, if they don't back up their important files, it's hard to recover corrupted or lost files of any kind. But that is to be expected when such unnecessary risks are taken.

For example, had a customer get a corrupted e-mail file one morning. Just copied in the backup from the day before and they were up and running in less than 5 minutes - and that was even done remotely. It's too easy if only a little care is taken ahead of time.


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## computertechie (Jul 10, 2007)

It is certainly the same pst file. Was the only one on the system, plus it has all the other data anway. 

Think I'll have to tell them that their data has gone 

It's possible that it has somehow been permanently deleted as someone else lost one of their sub-folders after a user was doing something on the system, but apparantly that person never touched the computer with the missing inbox.

Thanks for all your suggestions.


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## Bob Cerelli (Nov 3, 2002)

Perhaps a backup plan would now be a good next step. Again, doesn't cost that much


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## MISTER PC (Apr 22, 2008)

Hi,
1stly, I would like to say, great forum, have seen many solutions here that have helped me in the past and I wanted to give something back, hence why I took the time to reply to this thread. I hope it helps someone else.

I had a customer with the same issue as the original post here.
We could see her 1.7GB PST file, but it was only about 700MB when you view the total folder size or do an export.

I was about to give up, when we got lucky on a demo program that could actually read the missing Inbox messages in the PST file. As the 1st post stated, we could also see other things in the PST like contacts and sent items, but the inbox was empty and the customer had not deleted anything, they just disappeared.

After trying many programs and a lot of searching on Google, I found a program called:
R-Mail for Outlook.

It is the only program I found that would read the emails that disappeared.
I then took the plunge and gave them my credit card (Was a tad concerned, hate giving Credit Card to unknown companies) Lucky for me, all was okay and they sent me the reg code.

We have now recovered all emails that were in that PST file that were unreadable or unrecoverable any other way.

The website for this company for R-Mail is: http://www.outlook-mail-recovery.com

There is a Demo to try 1st so you can see if it is going to work for you. The scan takes alot longer than any other program we tried, but was worth the wait.

After buying it and scanning it again, (Had to download the full version to do this) we were able to recover all the lost emails into a new PST file.

I now have a very relieved and happy customer, and backups are now on the agenda as their Outlook files were not being backed up.
Small Businesses don't always see the value in a good backup system until a failure occurs.

Good Luck all who find this thread.

Regards
Brenden

MISTER PC
(Sydney, Australia)


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