Today, it is hard to deny that MS Outlook is the most widely used email management client. Most of the employees along with general users rely on Outlook application to communicate. An Outlook PST file stores all the mailbox data on its computer’s hard disk. But is it necessary that your Outlook PST file is always safe? The answer is NO. You may lose your Outlook mailbox data due to many reasons. One of the reasons may be corruption in hard disk or hard disk drive crash.
How hard disk drive crash affects Outlook files?
The improper handling of the hard disk drive may affect the data stored in it along with PST files. Though, hard disk drive crash can be prevented by performing the following measures –
- Scan your PC regularly with an updated Antivirus software program
- Backup your Outlook PST data frequently
- Fix minuscule errors yourself using inbuilt utility
- Scan for hard drive bad sectors
However, these measures are mostly forgotten by the users in their busy schedule. The different errors in hard disk drive lead to its corruption.
Errors in hard disk drive causing loss or damage of PST files
1. Deletion of hard disk drive partition
Partitions in a hard disk drive are made for easy access and to separate data. If a partition is deleted because of some reason, the PST file it contains will also get deleted. Loss of partition may be due to bad sectors, hardware issues, partition header corruption, or accidental deletion, etc.
2. Formatted Hard Drive
Before going to format the hard drive, the user has a backup of the data stored in the drive. Most of the times, the user does mistake and format the hard drive or its partition unknowingly. Some of the examples of accidental deletion are as follows-
- Selecting the wrong drive while repartitioning the drive
- During the update of Windows Operating System, formatting the wrong drive
- Severe virus attacks on your hard drive due to failure in updating the anti-virus software
3. Hard Drive crash
Your PC’s hard drive is always at risk due to one or more reasons. The chances for hard drive crash prevail if there is –
- Improper shutdown of the system
- Firmware fault or fault in CPU
- Corruption in operating system files
- An electronic failure due to improper power supply
Corruption in Outlook files is directly related to corruption in Hard Drive. Once the damage is done, it needs to be resolved. If your PST file contains relevant information related to your work, you need it badly.
Use an automated tool to recover PST from hard drives
Windows Data Recovery is the most promising recovery tool which recovers data from corrupted, damaged, crashed hard disk drives quite easily. It supports all available types of files for recovery, including the .pst format files. The strong algorithms of the tool provide clean recovery in original formatting without any loop holes. The tool supports all Windows Operating Systems versions for recovery. You can try its demo version to get an idea about its functioning. Here, are the steps for PST file recovery through this advanced Windows Data Recovery tool.
- Launch the Windows Data Recovery tool. Choose the scanning mode for recovery as per the need.
- Select the drive containing your PST files and click Next to start the scanning process.
- The drive scan gets started, and the tool shows the progress.
- After the scan, you can view the complete data, whether lost or corrupted, from that selected drive. To find the PST files only, click Find option at the top and type .pst on the search box and then click Start Search. All the PST files in the drive will get listed. Select the desired ones and click Save Selected File option.
- Browse and add the saving location for the recovered PST files.
- The saving process gets completed very quickly.
That is how lost PST files are successfully recovered with Windows Data Recovery tool in just a few steps after a hard disk crash.
Summing Up
Nobody knows how files get lost after the crash of a hard disk drive. It can happen to email files like PST also. In the absence of any manual solution, the recovery of PST files from Windows hard drives is done using Windows Data Recovery tool.
