Scope to Recover Hard Deleted Emails in a PST file

Published On October 18th, 2024

Reading Time 3 Minutes Reading

Category Outlook

Overview: Accidentally deleting important emails from your Outlook PST file can be frustrating, especially if they seem permanently lost due to hard deletion. However, recovery is possible if you act quickly. This blog covers the chances of how to recover hard deleted emails, why they get deleted, and that might help you in recovering.

What is Scope to Recover Hard Deleted Emails in PST file?

Before moving on to the point of recovering hard deleted emails from the PST file, let me first discuss the kind of data deletion from the PST file. Let’s get started.

There are two type of deleting data from PST file:

Soft Deletion: Deleting a file in such a way that after getting deleted the file resides in the “Deleted Items” folder. This type of deleting a file is also known as Temporary deletion of data.
Hard Deletion: When the data is deleted by using the Shift+ Del key combination or when the deleted item is even deleted from the deleted files folder then the data is said to be hard deleted or permanent deletion.

Possibility to Restore Hard Deleted Emails in Outlook:

It is easier to recover lost data when it is soft deleted but what if it is Hard Deleted. We will answer this question as we move further.

There is scope to recover hard deleted emails in a PST file if the outlook has not restarted after the file deletion, but if you continue to use MS Outlook for a long period of time after the deletion then the chances to recover lost data are less.

If the usage of MS Outlook is continued for a long period of time. Then also there are chances of lost email recovery in a PST file. The chances only exist if the user or MS Outlook have not compacted the PST file. It is because whenever the user deletes data in Outlook there is no shrink in the size of PST file instead there is a space left known as “White space”. When the PST file is compacted automatically or manually this space gets overwritten. Then there are no chances of data retrieval/recovery of hard deleted emails.

Possibility to Restore Hard Deleted Emails in Outlook:

Whenever the email or other data is hard deleted, there is no change in the size of the PST file. This happens because when some data is hard deleted. So, there is a space generated in its place known as White space. This generation of white space prohibits the change in the size of the PST file. The generation of white space is a function of MS Outlook to increase its performance. Because expansion and compression of files is a time consuming process which affects the functioning of the application. The MS Outlook automatically compact the PST file whenever it is running on an idle computer. Even the user has the choice of compacting the PST file manually. By using the “compact now” option available in the Ms Outlook and welcome new data.