pst file disappeared!

[Tony Winyard]

My Outlook pst file has just disappeared. I used Outlook
last night and for the last few months without any
problems, then this morning when I turned on the pc and
tried to start Outlook I received the following error
message:

Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. unable to display the
selected folder or item. The file F:\Documents and
Settings\Tony Winyard\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst is
not a personal folders file.

The Outlook.pst file was pretty big and contained a lot
of emails, contacts, calendar entries etc, but windows
explorer now says the file is 0kb?!
It can't have just disappeared and surely must be still
on the pc somewhere?
I tried using windows xp system restore and restored from
last night but it made no difference.

I would very much appreciate any help and advice anyone
is able to offer as I have a lot of precious work in that
file.

 

[Tedd Riggs]

Have you done a search using *.pst (make sure you are also looking at hidden
files) ? I cannot think of too many things that would make it vanish and
just with the normal overhead, I think even an "empty" .pst is around 3 KB
at least.
When you said that file was getting large, how large is large ? Over about
1.6 GB and you can run into trouble fast and if you hit 2 GB, most likely
you are going to have some real issues.

 

[Tony Winyard]

Hi Tedd,
Yes I did do a *.pst search and that only found a couple
of archive.pst files one was 160kb and the other 640kb.
The search found the Outlook.pst file which was 0kb. The
search did include hidden files and all drives.
I have no idea of how large exactly the file was although
I'm pretty sure it was not 1.6gb as I ran into problems
last year when the file got to big and so since then I've
deleted large attachments etc to try to keep it as small
as possible. I'd take a guess that it was around 1.2gb.
But IF it had hit 2gb or larger, surely the file would
still be there even if it wasn't working properly?
Thanks for your help.
Tony Winyard