Recovery method:
The recovery method used in this guide is based on corrupting the “Table of Contents” (TOC) on purpose and then have it rebuild by scanpst.exe. Hereby we also rely on the fact that a pst-file is a database where deleted content is still left in-tact within the database until the database gets truncated (Compact Now) or the “white space” (space that contains deleted content) gets overwritten.
The TOC is used by Outlook to determine in which folder a message should belong. When a message gets deleted, its reference is removed from the TOC but, as mentioned previously, the message is left as “white space”. When scanpst.exe repairs the TOC, it will come across the deleted message as well but is unaware of the fact that is has been deleted and will recover it to the folder where the message has been deleted from originally.
Note:
Depending on the size of your pst-file and the specifications of your computer, this recovery process can take a considerable amount of time. It is not uncommon that a pst-file of around 1GB can take an hour to recover on a reasonable computer.