3rd party tools to recover deleted Office 365 contacts etc

[Len Raphael]

"Office 365 small business" accessing via Outlook 2016 client.

At some point in the last 6 I deleted an important contact folder from my mailbox that I only use this time of year.

I empty my deleted items folder every day.

When I right click on deleted folder and hit "recover" I only saw items going back a couple of months. Maybe because I have the slider in setting to only save locally the last few months?

I logged onto the 365 portal, mail, and selected other to see my deleted items. Apparently I had lucked out applied a 5 year retention policy that applies to all Outlook items? Bad part is finding the 50 deleted contacts among thousands of deleted junk mails etc of the last 6 months and restoring them one by one.

Is there a third party tool to make that easier?

Len Raphael
Oakland CA

 

[Diane Poremsky]

They should be visible in outlook too... I don't know if you can sort by From online, but if you sort by from, the contacts should either be under your name or have a blank from field. If they were imported, they might have the email address in the from field. Check in both last, first and first last format.

 

[Len Raphael]

Well it turns out that I had not properly implemented my five year retention policy so best we can tell the contact folder that disappeared at least 3 months ago is not retrievable thru normal means avail in Office 365 E3 online. (default is 30 days then purge they tell me.) This time I also activated the feature of E3 to save everything no matter what for (I specified) 10 years. I forget the term MS uses for that. I'll probably add the Baracuda Office 365 backup to my existing cloud Intronis in the spring. What are the choices and costs for alternatives to that?

Wasted hours going thru 5 removable harddisks that I had so carefully used for frequent workstation image backups for the past two years. I was looking for the ost file. Acronis and MS Outlook techs didn't know that MS by default prevents backups of the ost. There's a registry edit to allow backups.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Honestly, I have no idea what program they are pushing (it was too annoying to watch - i scanned it but didn't see then mention the program in a splash screen). Stellar recovery products are good... Data Recovery Software Tools by Stellar Data Recovery

 

[Diane Poremsky]

BTW, if it's talking about shadow files, you may or may not have any to recover - if you never set it up, you won't have any shadow copies to recover. If you have some to recover, it may only go back a couple of weeks.

 

[Rick Hamilton]

Diane, I am importing OLD PST files into Office 365 Outlook. I have run these PST's through Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST repairs first. I make a local backup copy of my Office 365 OST, BEFORE I start an inport. JUST in case there IS still some corruption in the PST file, and the import to O365 CRASHES, is it possible/practical/workable, to restore the OST file from a local copy, and have my Outlook function as before?
I have Googled "Restore OST from backup", and I get ONE organic search result! Thanks! Rick.
[DOUBLEPOST=1490481966,1490473987][/DOUBLEPOST]And one more question about the "data cleanliness" of O365 Outlook. Since Microsoft is maintaining a duplicate of the email database up in the cloud, is the OST likely to have LESS corruption? Does Microsoft have any processes in place to look for and fix data corruption on their servers? Thanks again! Rick.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

If you are using the same profile that created the ost, you ca replace the existing one with the older one from backup, but may get error messages about it being out of date. It would allow you to export it to a pst those. Otherwise, you can only recover them using an ost to pst utility.

The ost is less likely to have corruption, especially of the type that would require restoring from backup. If the ost is corrupted, close outlook and delete the ost then restart outlook - it will resync everything.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

BTW...

Does Microsoft have any processes in place to look for and fix data corruption on their servers?

Exchange has procedures built in and they use a server farm for the mailboxes, so your mail is not stored on just one server, but stored in the farm - if one server goes down, the others fill in.