WARNING! Do not install Lookeen and Xobni!
In my last post I wrote that I was comparing two third-party tools that are used to search and index Outlook content; Lookeen and Xobni.
DO NOT INSTALL OR USE THESE TOOLS!!
After I was done testing them and uninstalled them cleanly, they each corrupted my Outlook.pst file in two different ways… and the SCANPST.EXE tool (shipped with Office 12) does not fix the corruption. I even tried Advanced Outlook Recovery and it couldn’t fix the damage either.
I replayed the damage from a clean, previously scanned version of a .pst file before and after installing, running and uninstalling these tools, and the corruption is reproducable (and produces an unusable, unrecoverable file).
Now I have to blow away the damaged .pst file and start from clean backups, restoring from my data exports. The data in my main “Personal Store” (.pst) file goes back 10 years, and has over 11,000 entries in it. Recovery is not a simple process.
I repeat: DO NOT INSTALL OR USE THESE TOOLS!!
Lookeen team said on February 15th, 2009 at 12:24 pm quote
Hi,
this is Martin from the Lookeen team. Sorry for your problems with the tools. So far I can only speak for Lookeen: We never experienced corrupted PST files on any client machines, because Lookeen is strictly READING Outlook data, it doesn’t make any changes on PST file or other Outlook data.
What happened exactly? Have you installed the tools TOGETHER first time? Maybe that caused the problems..
Feel free to send me more infomation about the misbehavior and please contact me if you have any further questions.
Martin
Maher said on November 27th, 2012 at 12:26 pm quote
where were your pst’s stored? Was this on the network? if this was the case they will get corrupted on the network with an earlier version of outlook 2010. I’ve had this issue myself in the past as well, always store pst’s locally and make a backup with a tool like pfbackup (also works in outlook 2010 with a registry change)