On personal level, the most used free email communication clients are Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook Express and Rediff Mail but when it comes to professional email communication business users always prefer a more advanced and effective platform (no matter if it is paid or not) like Microsoft Outlook. The most notorious features of Microsoft Outlook are mentioned below:
• Data Archiving
• Email Management
• Contact Management
• Schedule Management
• Preview documents
• Data Security
• Offline Mode Availability
• Social Integration (Available in Outlook Version 2010)
With the above mentioned points it has been proven that Outlook is more advanced than Outlook Express as Microsoft Outlook works with Exchange Server. An Exchange Server stores all the database files that contain mailbox items of all connected Outlook users in an EDB file. Extension of EDB is Exchange Server Database Files. In short Exchange Server is the data hub of all connected Outlook users. Though Outlook provides the best security of user's data still sometimes the Outlook data becomes inaccessible i.e. because of EDB file corruption. There are certain known and unknown factors which can corrupt the EDB file.
Below mentioned are the some of these factors:
• Dirty Shut-down
• Virus Attack
• Hard Disk Crash/ Hardware Failure
• Software Failure
• Human Error
• File Deletion
As EDB file corruption is not in our hand, it is better we archive the EDB data in PST format for security purpose. Timely data backup in PST format will reduce the size of EDB file. Indirectly, this will lead to fast data processing.
MS Exchange Server provides an inbuilt tool for converting EDB to PST called ExMerge. ExMerge utility extracts data from mailbox on the Exchange Server, copies them to a PST file, and then merges this data onto the destination Server. With various advantages, this utility has some limitations as well.
ExMerge Limitations:
• ExMerge increases the size of Information Store, thus it requires lots of free space on the hard disk to hold the complete process smoothly.
• ExMerge overwrites the permission of the source folder to the destination folder.
• Selective extraction of mailboxes is not possible while ExMerge is extracting emails from the Dumpster.
• ExMerge supports only limited versions of Exchange Server including Server 5.5, 2000 and 2003.
• The size limitation is another constraint with ExMerge. That means by using Exmerge you can only import the file that have size up to 2GB.
Above mentioned limitations sometimes restrict an Exchange Server user to avail the benefits of the same utility. In that scenario a third party tool like Stellar EDB to PST Converter is beneficial. This software supports both offline as well as online EDB to PST conversion. Preview of all mailboxes is also available. User can use this tool with all versions of MS Exchange Server including 2010, 2007, 2003, 2000, and 5.5.
With timely data backup in PST format there will be no chances of data loss any more. So keep backing up your precious data for smoother Email communication.
Author Bio: Yogita Aggarwal, based in New Delhi-India, is a Digital marketing professional and
a passionate blogger who loves to read and write blogs on technology. She is currently working as an "Executive - Online Marketing" for Stellar( #1 Data Recovery Brand ). Few main products of Stellar are Exchange recovery tool, EDB to PST and NSF to PST converter tool.
