22 Dec 09 A Quick Guide to Creating an Offline Folder File (OST file)

Users with Microsoft Exchange server email accounts and who work in environments that has limited or unreliable connectivity often prefer to work offline with their email server data. This data is often very crucial to their work containing all their emails, meeting requests, appointments, contacts, tasks and task requests. It is not surprising that users prefer to quickly work on the offline data than wait for connecting to the email server every time they need to update or check something. Of course, the next time they connect to the Exchange server, they synchronize the changes with the server. Microsoft Outlook stores the offline folder file as an OST file. These files however are at risk of getting damaged, in which case, you might need to carry out an ost recovery but first let us understand how we can create an offline folder file in Outlook.

Before we guide you on how you can set up Outlook to create an offline folder file, we should inform you that you can instruct Outlook to start offline automatically every time it starts so that there will always be some data in Outlook. Else you may want to manually control the connection state to either start Outlook in an offline mode or by initially connecting to the Exchange Server. To begin with, open Outlook and go to File. In the main File menu, go to Work Offline. Here you will see the option 'Prompt me at startup so I may choose to work offline or online' with a checkbox next to it. Just clear the box and then click on OK. Since you have cleared the checkbox, this means that whenever you lose connectivity with the Exchange Server, your Outlook will immediately start working in an offline mode with the offline data stored in the form of OST files. However, as we mentioned there is always a danger that these OST files too could get corrupted in which case you may need a tool that helps you with ost recovery.