Overwriten notes in outlook

Question

Hello

Please i need your help on this issue.

I have a user that is complaining that one of his notes in outlook were saved over by accident and wants to know if there is a way to restore it.

I went through his computer and did not see anything in the deleted folder. Is there anything I can do as an admin to get this data back. He claims this data is mission critical to his organization.

Answer 1

Hi @IniobongNkanga-8038 ,

Welcome to our forum!

I have a user that is complaining that one of his notes in outlook were saved over by accident

Do you mean that the user deleted the note accidently? If so, how did the user delete the note?

And does this issue occur in Outlook desktop client?

To quickly find the deleted note in Outlook desktop client, you can select Deleted Items folder and filter by Type and find the Note group.

If you cannot find the Deleted Items folder, please refer to the below steps to try to recover the deleted note from server:

1.Click Deleted Items folder > Recover Deleted Items from Server.

2.Select the deleted note and Select Restore Selected Items option, click OK.

(If you don't find the deleted note in this window, i'm afraid that you cannot recover it.)

3.Then the deleted note will be moved to Deleted Items folder. We need to find it in Deleted Items folder and move it to note folder.

Hope to help you!

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Answer 2

Notes in Outlook aren't versioned AFAIK. If they overwrote the note with a new set of values then the old data is gone. Unless they exported that data then it isn't recoverable. If they had deleted the note then it would be recoverable since it would be in the trash but overwritten notes are not backed up.

If the data is mission critical then it is a bad idea to store in someone's personal Outlook notes. This type of information should be stored somewhere that is more generally accessible, backed up regularly and ideally versioned. SharePoint would be a good choice for storing versioned documents. OneNote might work as well if it is backed up to SharePoint or similar.