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 If you are like many people who use Windows and Microsoft Office, there is a good chance that you also use Outlook, and that you use it pretty hard. For many people Outlook is not just their current email discussions. Outlook has their address book, their contact list, their calendar and their old but still important email conversations that need to be saved for one reason or another.
Sometimes it is useful to be able to move this data from one place to another, or to simply have a backup of it for safekeeping. One common task that occurs is that a person purchases a new computer and may just need to quickly move their email from one system to another. There are steps you can take to backup and restore your Outlook information and this article tells the basics.
The first, and perhaps easiest way for some people, is to buy software to do this. A simple Internet search on the terms “Outlook backup” will provide a plethora of information on backing up Outlook. Some of this information will be from vendors selling products that do this task. These are too numerous to go into detail here, but as with all purchased software, take care to look into what you are buying. Read reviews, see what others have to say. And, look for a try-before buy option that lets you acquire a version of the software that is full featured for some period of time so you can see what it does and how it works. And, before you commit, try to do a restore of the data. Just like you should check you full system backups you should also check that your Outlook backup strategy will work when you need it.
If you purchase software to backup Outlook, look for some specific features. Any good tool should allow you to back up ALL of Outlook, and that includes a lot: mail messages, archived email, contacts, settings and accounts, any rules (such as out of office or automatic movement to other folders), signatures, tasks, journals, and your calendar. It should be easy to tell the program which of these you want. Look for the ability to password protect and encrypt your backup—this is similar to what you would want from a good data backup and restore program.
Another way you can backup Outlook is to do it manually on your own. For many people, this may be all you need. To do this, you should first understand how Outlook works. In the folder where you have stored your Outlook data, you will find a file (or files) that end in a file extension of “.pst” and these have the data. If you have ever archived your old email, you will likely have a file named “outlook.pst” and “archive.pst.” The “outlook.pst” file has your Outlook email and the “archive.pst” has any archived email. If you are manually backing up your Outlook data, you will want to backup both of these files. In fact, it’s a good idea to make a backup of all the files that end with the “.pst” file extension.
Once you find the file, you can use Windows Explorer to copy and paste these files to another location. You might want to make a backup copy in a different hard disk location (not the best idea) or copy them to a CD or DVD, or perhaps to a flash drive. The idea is to have a copy of these files off of your hard disk. In essence you are making a miniature data backup, a backup of only your Outlook email program.
To restore your Outlook email you backed up manually, you’ll need to have access to your backup copy of the .PST files. In Outlook, use the File menu to access the “Import and Export…” action. You will need to specify where the .PST file is located before you can restore. You should also specify if you want duplicates of imported items of not. Typically you will say no to this. If you allow duplicates of imported items, you may suddenly find yourself with two copies of emails—the one that you had originally, and the one that was restored from the copy.
If you made a backup of your Outlook email using software that you’ve purchased, then you should follow that program’s procedures to restore your backup. The procedure to do this will, of course, vary from program to program. Your specific program may allow you to restore only parts of your backup (such as the calendar) while excluding everything else. This gives you maximum flexibility when you need to restore data, flexibility that the manual backup process doesn’t give you. And, remember, from time to time you should do a test restore to make sure that your backup is ready when you need it. As with your other vital data, you don’t want to be without that vital backup when you need it most.
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