Recovering an Orphan OST File

Googling for 'convert ost pst' turned up a handful of ~$600 utilities which promised to do the job. The search also turned up a $75 utility called "Recovery Toolbox for Outlook" which turns out to be a winner.

www.recoverytoolbox.com

It has some limitations, most notably that it cannot output pst files greater than 1GB. The workaround for a multi-GB OST or PST file input is to save the output as multiple 1GB PST files.

My OST file was only 174MB, but the recovery to PST file took about 3.5 hours, during which time Task Manager showed Outlook.exe continuously at ~45% of CPU and RecoveryToolboxForOutlook.exe at ~15% CPU. I suspect that this utility relies on Outlook to do much of its work.

While the processing is going on, there's a progress bar and counter for items recovered. The bar moved quickly at the beginning but very slooooowly toward the end. The last 500 of the 5000 total items were taking about 15 seconds each to process. The machine was a 2.8GHz P4 with 1.5GB ram. If I had to recover a multi-GB OST file, I would run the process on a dedicated machine and expect it to take a couple of days.

One other anomaly: When I opened the recovered PST file in Outlook, all the email items showed the date of the recovery operation in their Received field instead of the original Received date. Configuring Outlook to show the Sent field was an adequate workaround for my non-forensic purposes - the Sent field dates were good.

Update: The developer says the slow processing I experienced was likely due to my AV scanning each recovered item. And possibly also due to my desktop search utility (X1) that was also scanning in realtime. And he confirms that you cannot save to PST unless you have Outlook installed. I received his response just six hours after emailing my questions, which is a very nice level of support.