Contact categories data blank - mismapping?

Please forgive this duplicate post but having posted in the general Outlook
newsgroup I came across this one, so as this is specific to my requirement I
apologise for it being posted elsewhere. Please answer in this thread...

We have just restored a public contacts folder after recovery of our
exchange database. The recovery went well and all 2500 contacts were
recovered without any apparent errors. However, what is missing is all of
the data that was stored in the Categories field. I have spoken to the
company who did the recovery and they have said that category data stored in
a contact record should be like any other data field and therefore should
have been recovered successfully just as every other field in all the
contact records have been recovered. It is odd that it looks like just one
column is missing.

I realise that the category list is stored in the registry (as discovered
from reading other messages on the subject), but it isn't the list that is
the issue, rather the fact that the categories column (when viewing in
tabular, phone list, format) is blank where previously this showed the
actual categories which were assigned to the different contacts. The
categories stored in these records were our own custom categories, but even
adding the categories again to the categories (master) list doesn't display
the data previously stored in the records.

I found that with the custom fields we have that I had to re-create those as
new user-defined fields via the Field Chooser (in tabular view) before I
could "see" what value was assigned to them for each record. I assume this
is due to mapping of data to field names? Do I need to do something similar
to see the data stored for categories, but in a different way to that
described above? I don't see why this should be as categories is a standard
Outlook field and therefore should already be mapped, so I'm confused as to
where the data for this field in every record has disappeared to.

Does anyone have any wisdom on this? Thanks in anticipation.

Peter

Apologies - I forgot to say we are using Outlook 2002.

"Peter Lunn" wrote in message
news:kvcqc.12184$7S2.10568@newsfe1-win...
Please forgive this duplicate post but having posted in the general
Outlook
newsgroup I came across this one, so as this is specific to my requirement
I
apologise for it being posted elsewhere. Please answer in this thread...

We have just restored a public contacts folder after recovery of our
exchange database. The recovery went well and all 2500 contacts were
recovered without any apparent errors. However, what is missing is all of
the data that was stored in the Categories field. I have spoken to the
company who did the recovery and they have said that category data stored
in
a contact record should be like any other data field and therefore should
have been recovered successfully just as every other field in all the
contact records have been recovered. It is odd that it looks like just one
column is missing.

I realise that the category list is stored in the registry (as discovered
from reading other messages on the subject), but it isn't the list that is
the issue, rather the fact that the categories column (when viewing in
tabular, phone list, format) is blank where previously this showed the
actual categories which were assigned to the different contacts. The
categories stored in these records were our own custom categories, but
even
adding the categories again to the categories (master) list doesn't
display
the data previously stored in the records.

I found that with the custom fields we have that I had to re-create those
as
new user-defined fields via the Field Chooser (in tabular view) before I
could "see" what value was assigned to them for each record. I assume this
is due to mapping of data to field names? Do I need to do something
similar
to see the data stored for categories, but in a different way to that
described above? I don't see why this should be as categories is a
standard
Outlook field and therefore should already be mapped, so I'm confused as
to
where the data for this field in every record has disappeared to.

Does anyone have any wisdom on this? Thanks in anticipation.

Peter