While there are benefits to working with Outlook OST files, it is also true that the OST files are susceptible to corruption. They can get corrupted due to virus attacks or other malicious attacks, software failures or hardware problems. If you keep getting error messages while working with OST files or while trying to open an OST file, you may be required to scan the file to check for errors and the possibility of corruption. The best tool to use for this would be the nifty Inbox Repair Tool. This should be able to scan the OST file and quickly carry out some repairs if the corruption is not too severe. If the corruption is serious, you may have to try and recover exchange data using third-party tools but we will come to that a little later. Let us first look at the tools that Outlook provides to fix corruption issues in OST files.

The biggest advantage of the Inbox Repair Tool is that it can be used to resolve problems of corruption in both the Personal folder files (PST files) and the Offline folder files (OST files). The main feature of the Inbox Repair Tool is that it checks the physical structure of the PST or OST files to make sure that everything is intact or if there are any errors; if it diagnoses any error, then it will also repair them by essentially resetting the file structure as also rebuilding the header. This way, no complicated method to recover exchange data will have to be used.

However, one has to note that if you are using the offline folder files or OST files, then the Inbox Repair Tool will not scan the mailbox located on the Exchange server. It will simply check the physical structure of the local OST file to ensure that there are no corruption problems in it. If there are synchronization issues between the local copy of the mailbox stored in OST files and the mailbox stored on the server, you might have to use another utility called the OST Integrity Check Tool. This will compare the folders in both the locations and the individual items stored in the folders to determine where the differences lie. Having identified the differences, it now proceeds to recover exchange data that has been lost due to synchronization problems and also fix the problems. The OST Integrity Check Tool also does not change the mailbox stored on the server.

There are times when neither of these tools is successful in fixing a corrupt OST file and recovering data form the file. If you have not taken any backup of the data stored in the OST file or are unable to restore data from the backups, the best possible option for you would be to turn to specialized recovery tools such as Advanced Exchange Recovery from DataNumen to reliably restore data from corrupt OST files. In fact, Advanced Exchange Recovery can even recover data from corrupted media such as zip disks or CD-ROMs.