Not all SCANPST's are made equal

This morning, ran into a little trouble with my mail archive PST when opening up my e-mail at the office. Now, due to company policy, we have really very little space on the Outlook Exchange Server for storing mail. Anyone in the industry can tell you, you'll need to hang on to every e-mail you get and send out for as long as you can - you'll never know when you need to prove that someone told you to do something three years ago, that resulted in the big mess you have today....

I keep my mail archives in PST's by month, keeping the size to a manageable 60 ~ 100 megs per PST. The down side is that I'll have to remember roughly which month to start searching if I ever need to find anything, since Outlook can't search across many PST's at once.

Now, I used to keep all my PST's and working documents on my company-issue laptop. But lately, I don't know if it's the latest OS from Microsoft or the hardware or a combination of both, I've been getting BSOD's quite regularly, and already had my hard drive reformatted more than once. So, I now keep all my files on a permanent state of backup on an external USB portable hard drive. I won't say what brand of laptop I'm using, but here's a hint - it rhymes with "HELL"....

Anyway, upon opening up my mail on my desktop workstation (which was running on XP and Outlook 2000), I found that my November 2008 mail PST was somehow corrupted, according to the error message, and refused to open. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting my USB hard disk, and even tried rebooting, but to no avail. It may not sound like much, but the loss of 1/2 months' worth of office mail for the month of November would be enough to send me to an early retirement.

I followed the onscreen suggestion to try running the SCANPST utility to try fixing my PST file. After following the instructions, and waiting briefly for an 8 step pass, the SCANPST was done. Unfortunately, opening up Outlook and connecting to the repaired file yielded me an empty PST!

Not giving up, and thankful that I opted to back up my PST file before the repairs we made, I next fired up my laptop and ran the Office 2003 version of SCANPST on my backed up PST file. The steps were practically the same, and after another eight passes, I tried to connect to my PST once again. This time, I breathed a sigh of relief as I miraculously recovered all my November e-mails! My PST file worked back on my Desktop (Office 2000) too.

Well, I'm not really sure why my PST got corrupted in the first place, but I hope it doesn't happen again. Also, goes to show that not all SCANPST versions are equal, and the one that comes with the higher version of Outlook seems to work better!