Ah I love learning! Especially at my own expense... NOT! We recently underwent a mail sever upgrade from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007 and while I did not lose any mail, I lost a contact list and a bunch of notes. Well, not exactly lost...
Here is what I learned: Before the Exchange Server was migrated, I copied all of my mail to a personal folder. This is where something weird happened. My mail, contacts and Notes are ALL in a PST or so I thought because when I access them, I click notes or contacts on the Outlook bar and then must choose Notes or Contacts in Personal Folders. While I could not connect to our Exchange Server with Outlook, I was still using Outlook to busily make updates... Little did I know, the server upgrade came complete with a new certificate which when that was imported, aomehow made Outlook think I was connecting to a different mailbox. I discovered about 1 month later that although all of my mail was still available, I had lost My Notes and Contacts.
The upgrade took place over the holidays and being an efficient IT PRO during this downtime, I took advantage and cleaned my office by entering about 100+ business cards into the contact list and discarding them. I'll back them up soon enough I told myself... I also cleaned out my POST-IT notes from all over my desk.
Surprise!
Nothing to be found... I hunted anxiously knowing that these must exist somewhere and discovered an ost file with the date stamp that was the same as the date I resolved the certificate issue. Now theoretically, this is from cached Exchange mode and is supposed to merge back when you connect to Exchange. Unless you connect to a (now after the upgrade) different mailbox that belongs to the same user...
When this happens, it is like a hardware failure and rebuild... What happens is that your ost file becomes orphaned and you must convert it back to a readable format externally from Outlook. There are utilities around that convert ost2pst (I wrote it like that because one such utility is called ost2pst.exe). The problem, is that only the more $$$ non-free ones support OL2003 (I don't even know about OL2007...)
I tried a demo version of a product called Recovery for Exchange OST 2.0 from: http://www.officerecovery.com. The product first backs up your OST file and then converts it to a PST which you can open in Outlook. The folder actually gets named. order full version or something like that.
My contacts were back! Quick, copy to PST... OK now for the notes. All are there, copy them... Wait, only the first 2 have contents! Foiled...
So I am still missing several notes and have no way of knowing if all of my contacts were restored...
If this was for more than a single use, and not for only my personal mail, the price tag would be easily worth it...
Incidentally, as a community advocate, I posted to the Outlook newsgroup for help. Here is what an MVP posted as a response: "Sounds like you need to see your Exchange admin..."
Hmm, now I do not know about you, but that was NOT helpful. I wonder if the individual makes alot of money with answers like that??? Anyhow, I hope somebody benefits from my post, I will return to my newsgroup post and update my findings.