OST files are excluded from backup when VSS is used

When you use VSS with Syncrify to backup .OST files for Outlook, they are skipped during backup. This happens because the shadow copy created by the OS hides these files on purpose.

The following paragraph is copied from this blog on Microsoft technet.

"Maintaining changes to .ost files within shadow copies is expensive in terms of space and I/O activity. The performance impact doesn't occur during the image backup itself--the only extra work at backup time is backing up the .ost file as part of the image. Instead, the performance impact occurs during the ongoing, every day I/O to the .ost file when Outlook is running. If the .ost changes were kept in shadow copies, then every time Outlook writes to the .ost file, the result is a copy-on-write I/O hit (2 writes, 1 read). Although we have worked to reduce the impact of copy-on-writes on shadow copies, a heavily churned file like an .ost file could still cause problems. For these reasons, and the fact that .ost files can be regenerated, we chose to delete .ost files from the shadow copy before the image is created.

Even if the performance issues didn't exist, there are situations where Exchange will, after an .ost is restored, detect a future version of the .ost file and force you to delete and then regenerate the local .ost file. Therefore, it's still preferable to regenerate an .ost file instead of restoring it."