Scanpst file is in use by another application

Sign in. United States English. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. So, if Outlook is not installed properly or is corrupted somehow, the tool may not work. As an instance of such problems, consider a situation when you have a corrupted Outlook PST. You locate the Scanpst. EXE is in use by another application. Close Microsoft Office Outlook and all other mail-enabled applications and try again.

The file location, described in the error message, may differ that depends on the operating system and MS Outlook version. Read the subsequent segment to know how to fix the issue manually. Here are 3 great ways that might help you for resolving the issue like another app is using Outlook PST files. MS Outlook provides a free inbuilt program known as scanpst. Note — Sometimes this process leads to data loss problems because this utility removes the bad header files.

So, make sure to have a backup of their data whenever try to execute a scan with this tool. Outlook PST recovery is an advanced tool that helps users to repair the corrupt files. It recovers deleted data in a few clicks. In addition, the software retains the original hierarchy of emails and keeps the meta-data properties intact. If it still fails then, continue to the Repair process failed section. You can then press OK to close it and start Outlook again.

If the repair process fails, try running it again. If it fails repeatedly, but you can still access the file in Outlook, you can create a new pst-file in Outlook and copy over its contents. For step-by-step instructions see; Scanpst. An exception can exist if you are using an ANSI formatted pst-file and the file is around 1. Use their trial versions first to determine if they can recover more data from your pst-file than scanpst. There can be several other issues with pst-files which you can run into.

The most common are posted below together with their solution. If your pst-file is around 1. While the new pst-file format Unicode in Outlook and later versions of Outlook no longer have this limit, the limit still exists if you are using an older pst-file. If you can still open the pst-file in Outlook, then it is recommended to copy the contents to a new Unicode pst-file.

If you can no longer open the file in Outlook, then you must use the pst2gb tool to truncate the pst-file first. When you get CRC errors upon trying to copy the pst-file in Explorer or open it in Outlook, you usually have a failing hard disk which should be dealt with immediately.

When you get a pst-file in use error, it means that Outlook is still running or another application which integrates itself with Outlook or depends on the outlook. A quick fix might be to simply restart your computer.