How to Correctly Synchronize Your Exchange Server Mailbox with the OST File
If you have an email account on a Microsoft Exchange Server and are using Outlook to access emails, your contacts, appointments, notes and other important items then it can be frustrating to suddenly find yourself without any data to work on when the connection with the Exchange Server fails. Very often, users who work with networks that offer limited connectivity prefer to work with offline exchange data, stored by Outlook as OST files, on their local workstations. And the best part is, this data can then be synchronized with the data on the email server the next time a connection is established. Users however, have to be careful that they are carrying out the synchronization properly to ensure that no data is lost and also that they are prepared with a recovery tool such as Advanced Exchange Recovery to recover OST files, in case they give rise to too many errors.
Let us first look at how you can ensure that you are correctly synchronizing your Exchange Server mailbox with your OST files. You could either manually synchronize your folders or you could set Outlook up to do so automatically. Since you are better advised to set up the automatic synchronization, we will look at how you can synchronize your offline folders (OST files) automatically every time you are able to establish connection with the Exchange server and every time you exit Outlook. If there is a problem synchronizing the folders, it is possible that you may have a damaged file and you may need to recover OST files before proceeding.
- Start by going to the main 'Tools' menu, clicking on 'Options' and then choosing the tab titled 'Mail Setup'.
- You can see the 'Send/Receive' section from where you can select the check box next to the 'Send immediately when connected' option.
- Next, proceed to 'Send/Receive Groups' and in the dialog box select the option 'Perform an automatic send/receive when exiting'.
- Finally, click on 'Close' and then 'OK'.
These steps will ensure that your offline folders are synchronized properly and automatically.
While many solutions may offer to repair OST files so that a maximum amount of data is retrieved, Advanced Exchange Recovery comes with a few other advantages. Not only can it successfully recover OST files, it can do so with an ease and speed that not many tools can match. Advanced Exchange Recovery supports integration with Windows Explorer that allows you to quickly choose the files that need to be restored. It also employs a powerful algorithm that carries out a byte-level scan to ensure that nearly all the data from the damaged files are recovered without any errors.