Could Bitdefender Have Deleted My Entire .pst File?

Mikis Mama

I am in need of assistance, and am hoping this is the right place. My husband just purchased and ran BitDefender. I suspect he took all actions BitDefender recommended through its UI. Now, when I run Outlook, I get the message that it cannot find my .pst file. Doing a search on my harddrive, the only .pst file I have is a very old backup. Would BitDefender have deleted an entire .pst file? Is it possible the file was renamed with a different extension? I cannot believe an anti-virus software would have taken this action. Please help.

alexcrist

Hello Mikis Mama,

The .pst files, as I understand from the Internet (I'm using Outlook Express, and it uses a different type of files), contains the e-mail messages, calendar, and other personal data, related to an Outlook account.

While BD scanned that file, it might have found an infected e-mail. But, in this situation, BD wouldn't have deleted the hole file (BitDefender never deletes an entire archive if it contains one infected file... and the pst file is an archive).

So, the alternatives are these:

1) BD reported an infected e-mail within that pst file, it couldn't delete it, so your husband manually deleted the pst file (thinking that it's a virus)

2) the pst file itself might have got infected, and BD deleted it (I'm not a very big expert in viruses, but I guess that this is unlikely. Possible, but unlikely)

3) BitDefender might have nothing to do with this. Maybe that file got somehow corrupted, and Outlook itself deleted it, or the file might have been deleted by some other application.

In any of these situations, there's a chance that you can get back the file with a file recovery application. As far as I've heard, the best application for this is GetDataBack (but I never used it. What I used is an older version of EasyRecovery Professional, and it worked perfectly many times).

However, the chances of getting the file back drop with every operation that you make on your HDD. So, if you know on what partition the file was located, I suggest you to minimize all file operations on that partition, until you know if you can get the file back or not. Try to download an application to restore deleted files (s I said above), install it on another partition, not on the one with the file you want to get back and scan that partition.

Good luck in recovering the file (and I hope you succeed).

Cris.

P.S.: To check if BD deleted the pst file, you can check the scan log and see what actions did BD take on infected files.