Accessing ost files (Outlook 2000)

[djsp]

I am trying to access an ost (offline folder file) file for a new user that used them at their old company. The user would like to have access to these files again, and Outlook is telling me I can't open them as they are for a different server. Does anyone know a way around this?
Thanks

[aadenny]

There was a neat little utility called ost2pst which - uh - converts an .ost to a .pst. I bought it a year ago as a distress purchase when a 'consultant' screwed up our Exchange 5.5 upgrade and I was reduced to recovering our workstation ost files. The first version I got worked buggily and unsatisfactorily, and while they bug-hunted they sent me a command line version of a later version. It worked ok and I recovered the files I wanted. And it was a hefty but reasonable (for a distress purchase) $80. I had to chase, but several months later I finally got the GUI version, a compact 100k exe file, and keep it 'just in case', although I like to think my backing up is more secure now!

Today I've just read the latest woody's office watch which tells about officerecovery.com, which does the same job as ost2pst. I went back to ost2pst.com and found myself redirected to officerecovery.com, so presume they are the same people. But YIKES! the price!!! It's now an utterly unreasonable $500 for a single user! I'm a capitalist and think they are entitled to charge what they like, but I find it hard to recommend the product at even half that price. Of course, that assumes that you aren't trying to salvage your job in the face of a botched Exchange backup! I trust that the product is better debugged and functioning correctly by now.

[djsp]

Thanks for the reply. Anyone else know of anything? Not looking to spend $500 so a user can have their old emails.
Thanks,
Don

[MaryJ]

they are not accessible without the profile. if the user was using win98 and recently (less than 5 days ago) removed the old profile from their laptop, you can recover it. otherwise, you're stuck with $500 to recover it.

FWIW, this is partly to prevent theft of corp secrets - many osts are filled with company contacts or internal mails - former employees could easily leak corp information.