Recovering deleted fragments of Outlook PST file

mark1978 · 05-19-2009, 11:06 AM

OK, I think I know what the answer is going to be to this one, but bear with me!

In a fairly disastrous piece of hard drive re-organisation, I've managed to accidentally delete the massive OUTLOOK.PST file that contained my past six years' worth of emails. By the time I realised my error and ran Restoration to try and get the file back, it turned out that the area of the drive that had contained the file in question had been at least partly overwritten, meaning it was impossible to recover. I gather that usually, this is where the story ends.

But a PST file is effectively a database, right? Meaning that it contains lots of separate little bits that represent individual messages. So, even if it's been partly overwritten, meaning that the file can't be recovered in its entirity, it must be possible that there are still some parts of the file surviving on my hard drive - especially considering the size of the thing before I deleted it (> 1GB I think).

So my question is this. Is there some way that I can scan my hard drive for any remaining fragments and tatters of my old PST file, rescue any individual emails that survive, and store them safely in a shiny new PST file?

I can't see why this wouldn't be possible in theory, but then I've also never seen or heard of any piece of software that does anything like this. Can it be done?

05-19-2009, 11:06 AM	#1 (permalink)
mark1978 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2009 Posts: 9 OS: Vista Home Basic 32bit SP1	Recovering deleted fragments of Outlook PST file OK, I think I know what the answer is going to be to this one, but bear with me! In a fairly disastrous piece of hard drive re-organisation, I've managed to accidentally delete the massive OUTLOOK.PST file that contained my past six years' worth of emails. By the time I realised my error and ran Restoration to try and get the file back, it turned out that the area of the drive that had contained the file in question had been at least partly overwritten, meaning it was impossible to recover. I gather that usually, this is where the story ends. But a PST file is effectively a database, right? Meaning that it contains lots of separate little bits that represent individual messages. So, even if it's been partly overwritten, meaning that the file can't be recovered in its entirity, it must be possible that there are still some parts of the file surviving on my hard drive - especially considering the size of the thing before I deleted it (> 1GB I think). So my question is this. Is there some way that I can scan my hard drive for any remaining fragments and tatters of my old PST file, rescue any individual emails that survive, and store them safely in a shiny new PST file? I can't see why this wouldn't be possible in theory, but then I've also never seen or heard of any piece of software that does anything like this. Can it be done?