I was in the middle of enjoying my Friday afternoon at the office when I noticed that all of my archived mail and scheduled calendar appointments were missing from Outlook. Shock Horror! What was I to do?
After throwing my hands in the air, running around the room cursing a few dozen times I went to find out if something had gone wrong on the server - nope, all was fine there. The last server backup was a couple of days stale, and I'd only just organized my email folders for GTD and was daunting the thought of having to repeat the process.
The next step was to thumb through my disk looking for cached PST files that Outlook may have scurried away somewhere - no luck there, only stuff I found was way out of date.
So, I was just about to give up, when I noticed a menu item in Outlook 2007 called "Recover Deleted Items" - I jumped on that option faster than a hungry puma on bleeding zebra and was relieved to find out that I could recover my mail and calendar items. The process wasn't as painless as I'd have liked because the recovery option does not work on sub folders, just the current selected. Since my mailbox has a few nested folders, I spent the last hour recovering.
Lesson for the day - backup mailbox items daily to a PST file.
