OK Outlook Gurus

[Spada]

I've got a user who has an archive. oh no right? Outlook archiving... great. So in windows explorer file shows a size of 550MB or so. When I load the archive into outlook, right click -> properties -> folder size it's only showing about 140MB of data. Why am I missing 400MB of data?

Outlook 2007
Windows XP
All latest updates installed.

User (naturally) has no idea what she did.

Any ideas?

[vass0922]

delete everything in the file, and it will still be 550MB
PST's dont automatically shrink just because you removed data.

although I thought Outlook 2007 automatically did a scan when it opened PST's.. I maybe wrong about that

it may also be possible a filter is in place blocking it from view

[Spada]

not good when it's the HR VP's archive... and naturally she doesn't want to keep them on the server (which, ya know, is backed up every 12 hours) because it's 'inconvenient' to VPN in to access her archives.... *sigh*

[Spada]

It's weird that there are a lot of folders that now have stuff missing, however they aren't all grouped. It's like autoarchive went through for some reason and hit these folders, but pulled everything, but I don't think that happened. Autoarchive is set not to run, and in autoarchives .pst the files are there.

The reason I bring that up is sometimes users drag the folder into another one and 'lose' it, but this happened to multiple folders and I can't find them anywhere.

How could multiple folders be seemingly at random affected like this?

[vass0922]

usually corruption, or a filter

make a copy of the PST and run scanpst on it

[Steve R Jones]

What method did you use to restore?

It's possible the "archived" emails got mixed back into the regular Inbox etc...versus the "Archived Inbox."

[Spada]

Got it. had to corrupt the index on purpose, then rebuild it. Emails showed back up.... strange

[Spada]

What I figured was that (after reading) since the inbox had not been compacted that the email were still there, and vass saying the word 'filter' made me think that anything that had been 'deleted' was simply invisible until compacting.

SO after corrupting the index w a hex editor (found a post on the intrawebzors) these flags had to be rewritten with the new index, aka not there anymore. and they all showed back up.

[Spada]

Recover Deleted Messages

there's the post

[SeanC]

Have you thought of synchronizing their Outlook client with the Exchange server using .OST (I think) files?

Then they'd have all their email on their laptop without having to VPN to see it and you don't have PST file headaches.

[Spada]

we have them authenticating though an RPC client for their main exchange mailbox, but we haven't synced offline archives due to the size requirement of storing them on the server. So their main PST is synced, but all of the stuff they rattrap on to that is 10 years old is their responsibility.