I originally posted this on http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-outlook but it was suggested that I post here instead.

We have recently moved to Office 2013 in our department for both our email and calendar. In fact we are now using the entire Office 2013 suite.  Previously we have been using the Outlook Calendar only, and our accounts were maintained locally. We have the full Office 2013 suite installed on each workstation, our email, calendar, tasks, etc. reside in the "cloud."  I can access them by running applications on my workstation or by logging into my account at http://outlook.com/***.edu.

When we made the migration, everything was moved to the Microsoft servers. I had an extensive To-Do list which in the Tasks pane. This was migrated without a problem and continued to function as it has previously.  About 3 or so weeks ago, there was apparently an update to Outlook. After this, all items in my Tasks disappeared.

I have been told by our University IT department that these task are not recoverable, and have been given no reason why they disappeared in the first place.

I rely on the To-Do list to keep track of various projects, and am now stuck with trying reconstruct them from memory.

After extensive searches through various Microsoft forums I see that I am not alone in this issue, but I have yet to see a solution.

Oddly enough, I did discover that specific tasks that I had marked as "completed" are viewable if I open a separate "Tasks" window and click on "Completed"  under "Current View." However nothing shows up under "Overdue" which is what the missing tasks were.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Hi,

Can you see the missing to-do items from OWA? If not, I'm afraid your University IT department is correct. If you can see the to-do items from OWA, we may consider if this issue is caused by corrupt Outlook view settings. We can try to start Outlook with /cleanviews switch to restore all view settings to the default. To do this, press Windows key + R to open the Run command, type outlook /cleanviews and press Enter.

Please let me know the result.

Regards,

Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support

Thanks, Steve for replying.

No, the items do not exist in the Outlook Web interface either.  I have tried the /cleanviews suggestion as has our IT department. No luck.

I find it doubly odd that the previous "completed" tasks are still viewable, but the ones that were overdue (all of the others!) are the ones that disappeared.

--SteveC

Thank you for the update. Since the items do not exist in OWA, I'm afraid it's difficult to get these task items back. You may find and try some third-party recovery tool to try your fortune.

Good luck!

Steve Fan
TechNet Community Support