T1B

My company's server is hammering my Outlook account at the office. It just keeps dumping the last six months worth to my pc.*

...and 200g of mp3s are now unreadable from my pc at home.**
The cat's pregnant again***, my car window doesn't seal well, so my seat is soaked, and it just won't stop raining.

Is this the end of the world as we know it, or just another tricky day?








*Make it stop, El Taco. I promise I'll buy girl scout cookies from you next year. Really, I promise this time.
**I'll try reseating the connections when I get home, I added a 300g recently and it was all working well for approx. 3 weeks. The 200g drive is less than a year old, dammit.
***The cat's not really pregnant, I don't own one. Thank God.

Ok as far as email goes. It sounds like you have your work email save a copy of your email on the server. In other words, when you download your email into the email client (outlook) it doesn't ask the server to delete the images. Instead outlook keeps track of what messages it has already downloaded and just ignores those. Problem is that every once in a while this list goes bad and it just goes ahead and downloads every email. Common problem with outlook. Haven't found an answer yet. I generally don't recommend storing messages on a POP email server. If you are worried about backing up the emails, just find the Outlook.pst and Archive.pst files under (copy and paste into Windows Explorer) C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook.

If you back up those files weekly or monthly, you should be safe and sound. Then you can just disable the leave email on server or if you still want it stored on the server set an expiration on it under the outlook settings so that it only keeps emails for a month and deletes any emails you delete out of outlook.
To fix the outlook settings related to Delivery, go to the Tools menu at the top, Select Email Accounts. Leave the View and change existing e-mail accounts and click Next. Select the email account in question and click on Change. Click on More Settings and when the e-mail settings window comes up, go to the Advanced tab and you'll see the delivery options in the bottom. My assumption based on what you've said is that the Leave a copy of messages on the server is enabled but the other two options are probably not. I'd say enable both of the options below and automatically delete emails after a few weeks and when you delete them from Deleted Items in Outlook.


As far as your HD goes, there could be many many reasons. Can you see the drive at all or no? If you just can't see the drive, you'll probably want to go into the Computer Management MMC console and check to see if Windows sees the HD. If you have Windows XP Professional just Click on Start and then RIGHT click on My Computer and choose Manage (4th choice down). If you have Windows XP home, I think you'll have to find the Computer Management console through the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools folder. Under the Computer Management console you can look at your Disks under the Disk Management plugin. You should find it on the Left side under Storage. This should show any and all disks under Windows XP. See if it tells you that the drive is healthy or if it shows it as unformatted or if its missing all together. If the drive is not there at all, its either dead or its possible that maybe the plug has come lose. You will probably want to take it out and re-install it into the computer. New drives fail, even after passing the stress test that all drives are put through. I've had friends who have lost a lot of data because they didn't keep backups after they put all their data onto a new HD or new computer. There are ways to try to recover a dead drive without spending over $1k recovery fees that companies charge for the job. Can you feel the drive spinning up when the computer starts? Are you sure its getting power? (I know, it used to run, but check it anyway if its 'dead'). If its dead dead, let us know and we can give you some hints to try.
If the drive is there but its not showing healthy, something may have been corrupted in the file system. You'll want to run some error checking and maybe even a defrag on it. You can also go to the command prompt (Start-> Run and type cmd /x then enter) and run Check Disk (chkdsk command). If its a small problem, this may give you enough of a fix to get your stuff of the drive. If you still can't get anywhere, you may want to play with one of the Linux recovery CDs out there. Sometimes the NTFS drivers for those can read an NTFS drive better then the ones built into Windows can. This recommendation is also the way to go if you look at the HD under the Computer Management console and it sees the drive but it can't see the partition(s) on it. If you can't find the partition(s) in windows or Linux, you may have to try to do a partition recovery. There are tools out there that can help, although none are really free. Just search for file/partition recovery.

Last but not least if you can see the drive and browse it in windows but the files are not there then they may have become corrupted, could be you put them in a different place then you thought. Could also be you accidentally deleted them if you can't find them at all, in which case I would look in your trash box and then look to a file recovery demo software to see if you can find the files using that.

Finally, can't help you with the pregnant cat. Stop fooling around with the neighbors cat and do the right thing and support the little kitty.

You're awesome, I don't care what they say.
I am now going to have a look at the set of suggestions you have amassed here.

Thanks.











***Frisky tart, that one.

Now that you have all of your last 6 months messages, ask the IT guy to empty out your server inbox to a storage folder.

I use outlook to DL large files only, as I work from my webmail mostly. When I do have to DL big attached files, I move all other non pertinent but important email on the server to a temp folder, then I move it back after I finish the large file DL. I have my home outlook set to manual download, so it only down loads when I want, and by moving stuff out and leaving behind whatever else, it works well for me. I only get the files I need every time.

Don't know if that is of any help.

Thanks, Mister Bushice.

Apparently, between the update requests from everyone's blackberrys and saving everything to the server, we managed to cripple the server. :?

El Taco, I have created a separate account from my blackberry and unchecked save to the server. Thanks again.

I haven't had time to mess with the harddrive issue yet, but it still goes to chkdsk at bootup and reports a boatload of unreadable files in the HD in question...yet this morning, magically, the majority of files reappeared. Hopefully this weekend I can look into it and let you know what I discover.