I've just recovered from an interesting little experience to do with The World's Favourite Email ClientTM, otherwise known as Microsoft Outlook XP.

I'm a big computer user, and I'm rapidly outgrowing my laptop with it's 10GB hard drive....but then it is almost 4 years old so right for a replacement.

Disk space has been pretty tight recently, and I've got down to about 150MB free. Naughty, I know, but I didn't really notice it drop below 500.

So I go to check my email (bearing in mind my PC's been on all day, operating fine) and suddenly, Outlook throws up a "Unrecognised Hard Error" message. And closes. And in about 30 seconds, the whole system (W2k) stops responding and I go for the power button.

Then, I try and reboot.

"Cannot find boot device". Oooo-er. Sounds nasty.

Keep trying to "reboot". Same message. Beginning to panic.

Bit of lateral thinking, unplug and remove the battery.

Aha! Springs to life. Windows 2000 starts, but insists on checking the disk. It then does something wierd with my .PST files, renaming them coz they are fragmented.

Eventually I get to the desktop and load Outlook, which is in a mess. Can't find the .PST file. So I have a look, and my .PST file is truncated to an MS-DOS file name and has reduced in size from its healthy 180MB to a rather more anaemic 3.2MB.

Whoops!

(Of course I haven't taken a backup. Come on, "Backup's are for poofs, darling".).



So, the moral of the story is. Don't f___ with Outlook. I've managed to get most of my stuff back from my iPaq (Contacts, Calendar) but I'm totally without my email archives. And it's quite refreshing actually. I can cancel the subscriptions I've got but never notice, reorganise and generally clean up the clutter. Should make opening and closing Outlook quicker to.

And take backups!!