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Outlook 2016 pst file disappeared. How to find/recover/reconstruct
Wife's computer... Last Thursday she reported that the display of emails in her Inbox was blank. Subsequently found that the pst file named <her email address>.com(1).pst was not in the folder. It showed in Quick Access, date last accessed, file size of around 21GB, but clicking on it took me to an empty folder.
Have done the usual search for it, run chkdsk, booted from a USB using Ubuntu and run a undelete command to find deleted files - it found a file ending in .com.tmp, but a much smaller file.
Been running spinrite to check for disk errors. Level 2 (data recovery) ran in 30 mins and reported no recoveries to do. Now been running level 5 (data recovery and more) for the last 3 days and it reported it has read 3,2GB (of a 500GB disk) and found at least 3 bad sectors, unrecoverable, but no info on the files - might be/might not be. I've read of reports of spinrite running for days, but we can't wait that long.
Around 3 months ago a similar incident where files in a folder and subfolders disappeared, but these were mostly jpg, pdf and word docs. No trace of those files either.
Have no current backup of the current pst folder - have one from 3 months ago.
Nothing in the Events folders to suggest a problem, beyond some process reporting that the pst file could not be found.
This is so bizarre. Ignoring the earlier incident, though I'm thinking we should replace the HDD, I'm looking for ideas on what might have happened to that pst file, any suggestions or tools to search for/recover?
Or, is there a way to copy the 3 month old backup of the pst folder to the HDD and then download just emails from the last three months on the email server? She's using POP and all her emails for years are on currently on the server. Given the pst file was 21GB, I'd rather not download all those emails if a filter can be applied or do I need to download and apply some filter as they are loaded?
Thanks for any help!