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RadicalSoftwareSolutions

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How do I recover lost Outlook Notes?

Hi

I recently swapped over my PDA with someone elses. During the process I lost all my Outlook 2003 Notes (I did not loose the emails, contacts or calandar).

My Outlook is sync'd to my PDA via Activesync. My Outlook has several email addresses on it, the main one is a corporate Exchange 2003 mailbox and the remainder are links into my lycos email addresses

The basic question is Whre are these notes held? If they are in the exchange store I can recover that as it is backed up every night (Exchange is shutdown prior to the backup then restarted)

Any ideas?

Many thanks
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AndreDekolta

You will find your answer here:  http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=246153
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ASKER

Thanks for your reply

That article refers to mail messages and other mail type items, it does not appear to refer to Notes, also my Outlook is V2003 & Exchange 2003  wheras article appears to relate to much older versions of both
It does mentions notes...which are not recoverable once deleted.  You might try a restoration from tape, but I don't believe that will work.
Thanks for reply

I guess that goes back to my original question, in Outlook 2003 with Exchange 2003 where are Notes stored? If they are in the Exxchange database then I should be able to restore them as Exchange 2003 has far more management of recovery than Exchange 5.5 which the article covers. If they are stored on my local PC then I also have backups of that but, again the key question is where the Notes can be found.

Regards
I have now recovered these and just thought I'd put a note on this question to help any one else in the same boat.

The resolution turned out to be pretty simple. As I had set my Exchange accounts up as locally cahed (so that users could access their emails should the Exchange Server be down) all I had to do was to restore an old copy of the user's .OST (offline store file then startup the PC and disconnect it from the network, startup Outlook which would then use the restored OST file which included all the missing Notes files. I then synced these to the Pocket PC and copied them from the Pocket PC to safe storage. I then restored the current .OST file, reconnected to the network and restarted Outlook. As expected the Pocket PC duly lost all the notes again (as it synced the up to date .PST file which was missing the notes). I then copied the saved Notes files from "safe storage" back onto the Pocket PC (into the route directory) which fooled Outlook into believeing that these had just been entered on the Pocket PC and they were duly synced onto Outlook. Problem sorted!.

Obviously this whole solution depended on having a backup of my local hard drive but I suspect a similar result could have been achived by restoring a backup copy og the exchange databases and using that.
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ee_ai_construct
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