| This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
TOP |
Tuesday,
March 16, 1999
I have tried scanpst.exe, which I am told has fixed the problem in
everyone else's case. Not this time. Scanpst.exe reports that it cannot open the file, and
suggests I use chkdsk.exe, which does not in fact find any problems. If this doesn't mean
anything to you, read yesterday's view.
My situation is that the past two weeks don't exist. I can rebuild the subscriber list
since I have it as of 2 weeks ago and I have all the additions since, with some
exceptions. The exceptions are people who have sent mail saying they should have been on
the list for a long time, but have not got any mailings (possibly because they forgot to
send me a change of address with the return address at which they want subscriber mail to
be sent). I will rebuild the consolidated subscriber list, write something of interest (I
hope) and send a mailing to subscribers in the next day or so. This is complicated by my
head being all stopped up, making for difficult thought processes; it's amazing how little
you think about anything but breathing when breathing is difficult and I now have a deeper
appreciation for asthma sufferers.
I am told there is a "corporate" version of Outlook that allows you to open
many pst files, one for each folder in Outlook if you so wish, and keep each as a separate
file, making backups a little more complicated but also insuring that if one of the files
dies the rest are in good shape. I would love to do that, but the installation requires
apparently that I nuke what I have removing all registry keys and start over with
reinstallation. I would love to do that, but I am not up to it today. This leaves me with
an enormous pst file that I must find a way to automatically back up. These are serious
design flaws in Outlook. I like much about Outlook, but this is a very serious defect.
This will be in next month's column, and I'll send the resulting writeup and conclusions
to the Microsoft Outlook product managers. They need to fix this thing.
There is also in NT Administrative Tools a thing called INBOX REPAIR TOOL. It gives the
same messages as scanpst.exe and my guess is that it is really the same program. in any
event it refuses to open the file and gives an 'unexpected error' precisely as does
scanpst.exe so my guess is I am hosed. I could play games with a hex editor but I won't.
It does mean that all mail for the past 2 weeks is dead and gone, but I guess I can live
with that.
It is my own fault for not doing backups the past two weeks. I plead my bad cold; but
more than that, OUTLOOK will not let you COPY the pst file if OUTLOOK is open; meaning
that you must CLOSE OUTLOOK, copy that big file, then open it again. This is a SERIOUS
design flaw that Microsoft must be made aware of. I'll have a lot more to say in the
column. I like Outlook for a lot of reasons, but this is a good reason to look for another
mail handling utility.
It will ARCHIVE older files all right, to an archive file, and that's good; but the
active file should be copyable, or preferably there should be an automatic backup command.
Incidentally, archiving does not change the size of the pst file.
I am supposed to go to Niven's today to work on a book, but my wife isn't going to let
me out of the house.
I have learned more about restoring
Microsoft Outlook files than I really wanted to know, but the short version
is, I'm whole again, if not completely recovered then very nearly so. The story is
interesting enough to be the lead in next month's column, so I won't go into all the
details here. The important points are that there is more than one way to install Outlook,
and you may well want the "corporate" rather than the individual installation,
even though you ain't a corporation and you don't have more than one user. Second,
chkdsk.exe when run from within NT does NOT do the same things it does when it is run by
AUTOCHK on startup. When it runs on startup, it can, or at least in my case did, find and
fix a bad file, namely the old.pst file. That file had previously been uncopyable. Now it
could be copied. Moreover, now scanpst.exe could run against it, and after considerable
trundling, report that the file was fixed. Well, sort of fixed. Problems remained, but at
least it could now be opened.
I could then rename the current outlook.pst to new.pst; rename old.pst to outlook.pst;
open outlook; and use the import tools to get (import from new.pst) all the stuff that
came in during the 16 hour hiatus when all new mail went to what is now known as new.pst.
That seems to have worked. The trick was making chkdsk actually work on old.pst, which it
would not do unless I shut down. Interestingly, although I did a normal shutdown, autochk
decided that it was needed.
If none of this makes sense, it doesn't really to me. Diskeeper has a way to force
autochk on startup of NT, and I suppose there is another way to do that; I will have to
investigate. Why chkdsk repairs files -- the message was "replaced bad clusters in
old.pst" on startup but can't or won't do that when run within NT is another mystery.
Enlightenment appreciated, but please, not speculations. I can speculate too, and I have
my guesses, but I would rather know.
Incidentally, the NT Input Repair Tool and scanpst.exe are very likely the exact same
program, since scanpst.exe opens a message box that has the headings and icons you find
when you open the input repair tool from NT Administrative tools.
I now appear to have normal Outlook operations again. I repeat that Outlook needs a way
for individuals as well as corporate users to break up that enormous pst file into some
smaller ones; and the fact that you must shut down Outlook to back up that file is a major
annoyance since it means you can't schedule a batch file backup to run at odd times.
Then there was the matter of ALL. I have a folder called ALL. The first thing the rules
wizard does is send a copy of all mail to that folder. (This swells outlook.pst something
awful, but it’s the best way to be sure that I haven’t done myself in with a
silly rule.) My new and improved and restored system was having a big problem with ALL, so
I exported it to a csv (comma separated value) file, which worked just fine. Then I wanted
to delete most of the files. "Unknown Error". OK, make sure I don’t really
need anything from it, then delete the folder. Well, try to delete it. Outlook moved ALL
and all its contents into the delete folder all right, but then wouldn’t delete it
from there. Emptying the DELETED folder didn’t work, nor did EXIT which is supposed
to flush that folder. Open Outlook again, and there was that pesky ALL folder full of
message, not one of which I could delete. Finally I made a folder called GUP as a sub to
Deleted. That gave GUP and ALL as subs to Deleted. Then moved ALL into GUP. Then shut
down. Lo! When I brought OUTLOOK up again, there was GUP all right, but it was EMPTY! ALL
was gone with all its messages. So. Delete the empty GUP, which did in fact go away.
None of this changed the size of that obscenely large pst file, but I am hoping that at
some point OUTLOOK will look through that file and compress it and clear out unused space.
I sure hope it will. This is getting ridiculous.
I have mail showing that it may not be as hard to convert to "corporate"
accounts as I though, although I'll have to set up the mail again. If I can do that, and
compress that hideous obscene 140 megabyte pst file, it will be worth it, although given
my head is stopped up it may be harder than it looks. We will see.
This isn't so much all's well that ends well as all's well if I learn enough to get a
good chunk of a column out of it. If it happens to you, you will not have that
consolation. Back up that Outlook.pst file NOW, while you are thinking about it. And read
the column, in which I will boil all this into some kind of conclusions.
Microsoft, are you listening? You have some serious problems with
Outlook, which is a pity because in many ways it is a very good product indeed. First and
foremost, fix that huge unparsable pst file! Make it easier for ordinary users to have
multiple pst files with different data in each, and make it possible to back that sucker
up even when Outlook is open. Please?
My thanks to the many of you who wrote with suggestions. Eventualy one of them worked,
namely scanpst, but not until chkdsk had worked on startup, it having failed to do diddely
when run inside NT. That's another thing I don't understand but I intend to find out. Why
is something as simple as maintaining mail files, which are after all mostly ascii and
could all be converted to ascii now a major arcana, to be learned as part of an advanced
course in care and feeding of sick Microsoft Products?
Queries: Is there a tool for Internet Only
users to force Outlook to compress the pst file? Is there a way to export a backup (not
archive) file from within Outlook?
As it happens, many of those questions are answered
by readers: almost none of the answers are either intuitive or in the help files, but
most of what we need to do with Outlook can in fact be done.
TOP |
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
