Discovering the Location of Outlook PST files in your System

The Ms Outlook application can at times

behave in an erratic manner. Imagine a situation, where you open your Outlook Inbox and find all your emails missing from the Inbox. In such a situation the first thing that comes into your mind involves running an Outlook recovery tool to get back your PST files. However, finding where the PST files are lying can be a tough guess. In this article we will help you trace out the location of your PST files for your version. 

Locating PST files

Based on the version of your Outlook, steps to find the location of PST files may vary.

For Outlook 2003 and 2007 iterations, you need to first visit the Tools tab in Outlook and then hit the Options tab. Next you move to the Mail Setup tab and then hit the Email Account button. In the subsequent screen you need to click on the Data Files button. The entire path and the filename of the .pst file would be become visible to you.

If you are looking to backup the PST files, you can copy the location path and open it from the Run menu. From here you can copy the existing PST file to transfer it to another location. Incidentally the path names comes handy when you run an Outlook repair application like Inbox Repair tool which asks for the location of the compromised PST files.

Understand the scenarios which can result in PST corruption

The PST files in Outlook can get corrupted under a variety of scenarios. This may include instances when the application was not properly closed or an add-on remained active while you initiated a forced shutdown. At times a software update may not get properly installed causing errors in the underlying files. Moreover bugs in the application and even antivirus applications are known to trigger incidents of PST corruption. Rather mundane incidents like a power outage can lead to a PST file error while bad sectors in the storage media can also lead to the issue. In case you have experienced a virus attack that affected your Outlook emails then a PST corruption can very well be on cards.

One of the most common causes behind PST corruption involves the increase of data in the PST file. Older iterations of Outlook could not support files more than 2GB and the moment your inbox data reached the limit, the underlying PST file would get corrupted without giving a warning.

  

Avoiding data loss even when your PST files get thoroughly messed up

In some cases, the PST files of your Outlook application can get completely corrupted. Even if you open the files in a different Outlook instance, the data remains incomprehensible.  In such cases, a potent pst repair program like the state of the art DataNumen Outlook Repair can save your day. It has the capacity to bring out the data from even virtual machine drives and can even deal with large sized files with ease. 

Author Introduction:

Alan Chen is President & Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including sql recovery and outlook repair software products. For more information visit http://www.datanumen.com/