How to Prevent PST Corruption

Corruption of the PST file will bring your Outlook usage to a halt. This can be a costly interruption to your business, both in dealing with clients and with internal business worman yawning at computercommunications. While there are programs available to help you quickly restore Outlook, learning how to prevent PST corruption is helpful information to have. You won’t be able to prevent 100% of the instances, but you can mitigate the disruption and risk.

Avoiding Shut Downs

The most common cause of file corruption in Outlook is a sudden or forced shutdown. Outlook is designed to perform an exiting process that writes to the PST file as it is closing. If this process gets interrupted, then the file will be corrupted and unreadable. There are two ways to avoid shut downs that will necessitate performing Outlook repair. The first is to become more aware of your system resources management and to be proactive in controlling how they are put into use.

Programs and operations that rely heavily on system resources can create a conflict that overwhelms the system and will cause it to force a shutdown to recover. The easiest way to do this is to use a system of dedicated operations. Don’t try to run every operation off one computer. Reserve some units for certain functions and others for system heavy operations. One thing to watch for is any rendering or compiling operation; these should only be performed on dedicated units.

The other way to avoid having to recover Outlook is to install a backup power source to protect against sudden shut downs caused by power loss or surges. The standard power strip is not going to provide enough protection because what is really needed is a reserve power supply to allow programs like Outlook to go through their exit process.

Fixing PST Corruption

There are two ways to fix PST corruption, one you can perform in-house with a program designed for Outlook recovery and the other is to access data recovery services. Your first step should be to use an Outlook recovery program. It is better to order a program that matches the current version of your Outlook software before you have a need to recover files. Make sure that all the current updates to the Outlook program are installed, and update the recovery program as well on a regular basis. This way the moment there is a sudden shut down, you can be proactive in reclaiming your system and files.

If the program cannot perform the repair on all of the files, and no program is guaranteed to recover 100% of them, then you need to use specialized services. With data services an engineer or programmer will perform the recovery on a file by file basis, this increases your chance of repairing the PST file, but is still not a hundred percent guaranteed. The best way to mitigate your risk is to have a combination of backup power systems, on hand repair programs, and a relationship with a specialist already in place. If you don’t currently have these, be proactive and line them up now.

 

DataNumen, the world’s leader in data recovery, is prepared to assist you with Outlook repair, or any other data repair, at any time, day or night.

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