If you have been a regular user of Microsoft Outlook, you are probably very impressed with the wide variety of features that it has to offer as well as the ease with which you can do various things with it. You could use it as just an email client, note down important appointments, track projects, make quick notes and many other such things. Not surprisingly, you may have stored quite a bit of valuable data in your Outlook personal folders file ' PST files ' as they are called. When that is the case, it is best that you take backups of your PST files as often as you can. Further, if you do face problems opening up your folders, you should immediately run the Microsoft Inbox Repair Tool and repair PST files so that you do not lose any of your crucial data.

 

Let us therefore understand a little more about this Inbox Repair Tool, how to use it and what to do if you are unsuccessful with this tool. You can use the Inbox Repair Tool (a file titled - scanpst.exe) to see if it can be used to repair problems with your PST files. A very powerful repair tool, it notes that a PST folder is damaged even as your Outlook is trying to open the folder and then tries to fix the errors in the file. This repair tool is contained in both the Microsoft Office CD-ROM as well as the Microsoft Outlook CD-ROM. Usually, it is installed automatically during setup of Office or Outlook and helps you to repair PST files fairly easily.

 

The few basic steps that you need to take to get the Inbox Repair Tool going are as follows:

  1. Using the Search tool, you should look for the Repair Tool or the file titled scanpst.exe.
  2. Next, identify where the PST files that are suspected of having errors are located and select the one that needs fixing.
  3. Finally, click on Start.

It is important to understand how the Inbox Repair Tool actually works. As soon as you start the tool, the first step it takes is to analyze the affected file and determine what can be recovered successfully. This would include looking at the file directory structure, item headers and so on to know what has been affected and how much can be restored. When and where possible, the Inbox Repair Tool identifies the errors in the file and repairs them to the extent possible.

However, it is entirely possible that the PST folders have been so seriously damaged that the Inbox Repair Tool proves unsuccessful in recovering all the data or even in opening the PST file. It is best to repair PST files that are so seriously damaged by using third-party software such as Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen so that you can carry out a speedy Outlook data recovery without having to worry about data loss or the structure of the restored data.