Used System Restore to Recover Deleted Exchange Account

I had a bit of a scare last night when I wasn’t closely paying attention to what I was doing and deleted an Exchange account. I should clarify that I intentionally tried to delete my account, but I didn’t realize the impact of that attempt.

All day I kept getting prompted for login and password information when I would try to Send/Receive email from Outlook. I’ve been using the machine for over three years now and have never had this issue. I’ve been getting some weird behavior on a variety of areas lately so didn’t really know what was going on.

I was thinking I could just delete the connection for the time being and try to restore it later once I was able to reconnect to the server at the office. What I didn’t realize would happen is it also deleted my entire Outlook .ost file that was holding all of my folders and email. Oops!

I couldn’t really figure out what to do to recover the file. I couldn’t manually try to open the .ost file through the file menu with any success. Everything I was reading online and hearing was that there was no real way to recover it without connecting to the server. The problem is I haven’t connected to the server in quite some time now so anything that would be recovered there was probably going to be useless.

I decided to try using a System Restore to see if that would recover the Exchange account information. It did! Luckily I had just updated the Java machine earlier in the day and with that install a new restore point was created. The only thing I really lost was some custom folder settings and organization of my “Favorite Folders” as defined within the interface.