PST Recovery Tool Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Microsoft's built-in ScanPST.exe (Inbox Repair Tool) truncates unreadable sectors to force a file to open, often resulting in lost items. In contrast, Prism PST Recovery employs deep B-Tree node reconstruction and unallocated raw block carving, recovering corrupted 512-byte headers, lost folders, and orphaned messages without deleting corrupted items.

When an email is permanently deleted (Shift+Delete or emptied Deleted Items), Outlook marks the corresponding B-Tree node as freed but leaves the raw Heap-on-Node data intact until overwritten. Our engine scans unallocated data pages, parses orphaned Outlook property tables, and resurrects deleted items with high-visibility red badge indicators.

The built-in inspector provides 8 distinct investigative perspectives for every recovered message: Normal View (Formatted Text & HTML), Raw Hex Dump with ASCII matrix, Outlook Tag Property Grid, RFC 822 Internet Headers, Raw MIME Source, Clean HTML Render, RTF Stream, and an Attachment Viewer with binary extraction.

No. You don't need Outlook, Exchange, or Office installed at all. Prism reads raw binary blocks directly using an internal 64-bit parser that processes files independently on 64-bit Windows systems.

The recovery engine supports Compressible Encryption and High Encryption PST files. Test your own file in the free trial to confirm the result before buying.

Prism reads large archives in chunks instead of loading the whole file into memory. Test your own file in the free trial. You can also export the recovered mailbox with automatic file splitting at 2GB, 5GB, 10GB, or 20GB thresholds.

You can export recovered items into a newly rebuilt Healthy Unicode PST, EML (standard RFC 822), MSG (individual Outlook messages with email properties), HTML, and MBOX. All attachments, inline graphics, and folder hierarchies are preserved intact.

Quick Scan repairs damaged 512-byte headers, fixes broken B-Tree pointers, and recovers standard folders in minutes. Advanced Deep Carve performs an exhaustive sector-by-sector scan across all allocated and unallocated data blocks, designed for formatted, truncated, or zero-byte header files.

The free evaluation allows you to perform complete Quick and Deep Scans, view the entire folder hierarchy, read message bodies, inspect hex dumps, and view attachments. You can export up to 50 items per folder in the free trial to verify recovery results before purchasing a license.

No cloud service of ours is involved. Every parsing routine, cryptographic hash calculation, and file conversion happens strictly in your computer's RAM and local disk. Prism does not send your email contents to Prism servers. If you choose a cloud destination, data goes to that service.

Yes. The engine directly parses inaccessible offline OST cache files from Exchange Server, IMAP, and Microsoft 365, converting and recovering them directly into standard healthy PST, EML, or MSG files.

The current release of Prism PST Recovery Tool is for 64-bit Windows (Windows 11, 10, 8.1, Server).

Following successful payment, your digital license key is delivered to your billing email address. If you need your key resent or require assistance with activation, you can contact our team anytime via our Contact Support page.

We provide free evaluation versions for all tools so you can test compatibility and conversion fidelity on your own data before buying. If you encounter a verified technical limitation or defect that our engineering support team cannot resolve, purchases are covered under the terms detailed on our Refund Policy page.