The blog explains the importance of PST encryption and provides the solution to recover emails from encrypted PST files. It describes the complete procedure to repair PST files that are password protected and restores them into an unencrypted format.
MS Outlook is one of the most popularly used emailing clients in business. The application acts as a personal manager that organizes data in an efficient way. Outlook uses PST as its data repository that contains the entire mailbox data including emails, calendar entries, contacts, tasks, journals, etc.
The PST file is stored locally on the client machine and can be accessed independently without connecting to the Server. Sometimes, these files contain crucial information and therefore needs to be protected from unauthorized access. MS Outlook offers the feature to encrypt PST using passwords as this safeguards incorporated data against invalid access and unnecessary data editions.
Password protection for the PST files is beneficial as long as the encryption code is well remembered by the user. The situation becomes worse when the password is no more remembered and the access to PST file is lost. Under such situations, you need to recover the encrypted PST file. Moreover, the PST files are prone to corruption that occurs due to damage to the file, corrupt file header, virus attack, oversized PST, and similar issues.
Since Outlook data files are bound to store a stipulated volume of data, it turns inaccessible once this pre-defined storage cap exceeds. In such cases, the corruption is considered severe as data gets deleted or the file becomes inaccessible. In several cases, Inbox Repair Tool, the built-in utility, can be used to fix minimal corruption issues in the PST files; however, it is not much help when the damage is higher.
There are other limitations as well as the tool is bound with. It does not repair the password protected PST file and retrieves data from only the mailboxes that are not encrypted. These limitations make the built-in utility quite restricted to fix few issues only.
Repair Encrypted PST Mailboxes
Excluding the Inbox Repair Tool, there is no integrated way to recover encrypted Outlook PST files or logically corrupt files. Only professional repair solution is the only way to retrieve data from encrypted Outlook PST files when other tools fail to do so. Stellar Repair for Outlook is a third-party tool that helps gain access to data stored in encrypted files.
Other than encrypted PST file recovery, the PST repair software is capable of retrieving data from oversized mailboxes and highly corrupt PST files. The procedure to retrieve data from encrypted PST files is simple, straightforward, and user-centric as well. Follow the steps below:
- Download and run the software.
- From Select PST File for Repair dialog box, select or find the PST file that needs repair. Click on Browse if the location of the PST file is known. Alternatively, click on Find if you do not know the location where PST file is stored.
- Next, click on Start button to initiate the scanning process
Additional Information!
- When the tool runs the process to recover encrypted PST file, the status of the scanning process is displayed in the status bar.
- The time that the tool takes to accomplish the scan process depends upon the volume of the PST file and the intensity of damage.
- If the PST contains the higher volume of data, the scan process may take some time.
- The scan process can be stopped in between by clicking on the Stop
- When the scan is completed, the tool will display all the recovered files along with the folders in the left pane. Click on any file or folder to preview the incorporated contents within the panel.
- After accessing the PST contents, click on the checkboxes to select the desired files and folders. Once all the files that need to be recovered are highlighted, click on Save Repaired File icon available on the File
- Next, under ‘Save as’ section, select the file format you need to recover the data to.
- Under Destination Path, provide the location where you want to store the recovered file.
- Click on OK to accomplish the encrypted PST file recovery process
The Way Forward
Stellar Repair for Outlook is an efficient software to recover emails from encrypted PST files as it does not ask for the password while processing the encrypted files. The recovered PST file does not ask for password while you attempt to access it.
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