I recently installed Ad-Aware Anti Virus to check about any spyware installed on my laptop. I chose Ad-Aware because it was the most downloaded AV on Download.com and also it had good reviews. The installation took a long time because it downloaded files during the installation, also it took long time to scan my HDD, after the scan it reported 7 infected files, all those files were patches except 1 which was the PST of my outlook.
The default option was quarantine, definitely I would not like to quarantine my PST so I chose disinfect for all files. The operation completed and it deleted 6 files other than the PST. As I had not chosen deletion and it didn’t ask me before deleting thus I immediately checked my PST file, it was still there so a sigh of relief. I proceed with my other work and when I restarted my Laptop, poof! The PST was gone!
Upon investigation it was found that Ad-Aware setup the deletion of the PST file upon restart. Well I tried to recover my PST using Recuva File Recovery, it informed me that the file is in poor state because a windows log file has already over written it. Anyway still it recovered the PST but it was corrupt and outlook was unable to open it.
Then for repairing the PST I used How to repair your Outlook personal folder file (.pst), and it repaired the PST. I opened it in outlook, there were some additional folders created under Lost and Found, rest of the emails were still intact thus fortunately I was able to get my emails back.
It took me several hours to complete the above process. Ad-Aware should have asked for my permission before deleting an important file like PST thus I wont recommend anyone to install it.
-urShadow
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