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General discussion

personal folder .pst is gone

Aug 9, 2004 2:35AM PDT

I don't know how, but it did. I'm running an office xp suite on a windows xp home edition system. Everything is updated regularly. Just yesterday when I was openning Outlook 2002, it gave me an error: "personal folder at C:...etc. is not found", and then it asked me to locate the .pst folder or create a new one? My system is a standalone comupter, that is not connected to anynetwork, and all my .pst files are located on my harddrive. I already have done a lot of search about .pst folder problems running on windows xp, but most of them do not apply:
1. my .pst file was not hidden, so the common problem of windows xp treating .pst file as a system file does not apply here.
2. I did not keep my .pst file on an exchange server.
3. My .pst file never reached the 2GB troublesome size, where it gets truncated or trimmed by windows

It just disappeared, I tried search or find, and it seems the file is not there.

Can anyone, please, tell me if there's a way around this problem?

Discussion is locked

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Re: personal folder .pst is gone
Aug 9, 2004 2:40AM PDT

Restore it from your last backup. Many of us use this procedure.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=287070

Remeber that we only lose what we didn't backup. There is no fix for those that won't backup except to watch them have repeated losses and reminding them about backup.

"Hard disks are temporary storage."

Bob

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Re: personal folder .pst is gone
Aug 9, 2004 6:00AM PDT

Thank you for the reply. I know about the backup process, and I had already backup up my system long ago. But the funny thing is the folder which contained the backup, that happened to be the same folder for the .pst file, was lost too.

I found them just a few hours ago in a folder called "find0000000" with hidden attributes, I guess the system created that file when there was a problem with my Index file of partition c:, where I keep most of my important files

Thanks anyway

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Two remarks
Aug 9, 2004 6:10AM PDT

One of most essential things about backup is that it is done on another medium than the one containing the original. Removable (like CD-RW or diskette or USB-key or tape) is usual, but there is little against a copy to a networked drive on another computer in your home network.
So it's clear you didn't make a backup, just a copy.

You get better help if you tell the whole story, not half of it. Having had troubles with the hard disk can certainly be relevant. And what, by the way, do you mean with 'Index file of c:'?

Kees