Outlook PST file – Location – Recovery – and How to Backup!

Outlook PST file (Personal Storage Table) is probably the MOST important file for any Outlook user (97,98,2000,2002,2003,2007,XP,2010). This file stores the following items: Email messages, contacts, appointments, tasks, notes, and journal entries.

Day after day, month after month, it accumulates and stores all that data into that single file. Over the years this file gets bigger and bigger and becomes one of the biggest files you’ll ever have on your PC. My current 5 years old PST file for example, ‘weights’ around 2.3GB.

The fact that all that data is stored in a single file is its biggest disadvantage – should something happen to it, may that be a sneaky virus, unexpected corruption, or someone intentionally/unintentionally deleting it, you might lose all that data…(unless you have a backup).

How to locate it
The location of this file differs between the various Windows systems and Outlook versions. I know that many users are having trouble in finding the path to where that file is located on their PC. There’s a little trick you can use in order to find your exact Outlook PST location in just a few seconds.

(1) Install the following PST Detection and Recovery tool
(2) Click Find Outlook File
(3) Specify the drive to search, click START and wait until it finds it…

Repairing a corrupted PST file
Unfortunately this might happen to any Outlook user (and it is beyond your control) - you may one day find yourself unable to open Outlook, access your data, or use it. There are so many reasons why this may happen, but in many cases it is due to a corrupted PST file.

Here are just a few typical error messages that indicate that your PST file is most probably corrupted: error 0x80040119, error 0x80040600, error 0x80040116.

It can get corrupted due to a malware (malicious software) attack, as one example, another example is when Outlook is being closed unexpectedly due to a Windows crash or an unexpected power failure.

Microsoft provides a free tool called Scanpst.exe (Inbox Repair Tool) which is already embedded inside your Windows system (37K file size), it supposed to repair corrupted PST files, but unfortunately it isn’t that good, and in many cases it won’t do the job. (As an example of one limit - it won’t fix files that are approaching/exceeding 2GB size)

Fortunately, there are several other professional PST recovery tools that enable you to check, repair, and restore seriously damaged PST files no matter what their size is.

How to backup PST files
As you’ve learned, this file is extremely critical - if you haven’t backed it up so far, do it NOW! I’ve seen too many Outlook users who lost years of hard work for not doing that, whether that be due to someone stealing their PC, or due to a seriously damaged hard drive…

There’s an excellent backup solution (absolutely free - download their freeware version) that I’ve been using for years to automatically backup Outlook PST files. I highly recommend you to use it, it takes 5 minutes to setup, and from that point you don’t have to do anything…it works for you 24/7.