SCANPST corrupted my PST file - Can I reverse this or recover original emails?

bi999 0

Hello,

I am hoping someone might have some insight as to what has happened here and have a resolution. I have Outlook 365 Enterprise account, Version 2306, Build 16529.20226. I have been using 2 separate pst files to store old emails, named archive, archive 22, respectively. The pst files are large ~30G each, but under the 50G limit. I have been experiencing frequent Outlook lockups over the past year. Typically running ScanPST to repair them helps somewhat, but doesn't alleviate the issue. Just yesterday, I had to run ScanPST again on them, as the lockups had become severe and frequent. I created a *.BAK for each using ScanPST before performing repairs. WHen i opened the repaired PSTs again in outlook I found the contents of the archive 22 backup had been replaced by the contents of archive backup, in other words, they were both identical. When I opened the backup versions I found the same - archive 22.bak had the same content as archive and archive.bak, so it appears to have copied archive contents over to the archive22 backup. Can anyone explain what happened here and if I have any recourse to recovery or have I lost this data? Hopefully, I've described this situation correctly. Thanks.

Faery Fu-MSFT 18,526 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-09-12T07:06:48.5133333+00:00

Hi @bi999 ,

I have been using 2 separate pst files to store old emails, named archive, archive 22, respectively.

How were your data files generated? Did you use the archive function or export items directly to .pst file?
bi999 0 Reputation points

2023-09-14T21:43:33.4166667+00:00

THanks, I created the files from within Outlook and then added emails into the file over time. Eventually, Outlook began to lock up or not respond immediately when I would search those PSTs or drag new emails into them. At some point there would be an office update which would resolve the issue, then sometime later a WIndows update which would cause the issue again and the cycle has repeated for a year. WHen the lockups and unresponsiveness would get partcularly bad, i would run SCANPST and things would moderately improve for a time. This past time one of the files became corrupted and now has the exact contents of one of the other archives even though i did not change file names - it as if the archive file now points to the location of the other emails, so i have two identical PSTs now instead of two different PSTs.
Faery Fu-MSFT 18,526 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-09-19T09:01:13.19+00:00

Hi @bi999 ,

According to my research, this happens for various reasons such as disk errors, network issues, antivirus software, etc.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to recover the original content of a corrupted PST file. The SCANPST tool can only repair file structure and integrity, but cannot recover data overwritten by other files. You may need to use third-party recovery software to scan the disk for deleted or lost PST files and try to recover them. However, this is not guaranteed to work and may depend on how much the disk space has been overwritten by other files.
bi999 0 Reputation points

2023-09-19T11:05:12.48+00:00

Thank you. This is what I expected to be the case.

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SCANPST corrupted my PST file - Can I reverse this or recover original emails?