How do I backup Outlook contact and calendar files, please?

[Mrs G Chew]

Dear All,

God bless 2010 to you. You were very helpful to me last summer as we
embarked on our holiday, but I now have an Outlook 'crash' situation to deal
with.

Version Outlook 2007 (12.0.6514.5000) SP2 MSO (12.0.6425.1000)

PC: Windows XP (updated regularly) Laptop: Windows Vista
Mobile/PDA/Smartphone: HTC-S620 running Windows Mobile 6 (not updateable,
the phone is locked in between Windows Mobile 6/ActiveSync4.5 and Office
Mobile - I can't locate any version numbers, but the last software update
issued by BT (formerly British Telecom) was in January 2009-ish. This is a
QWERTY-phone, not a touchscreen. When everything works, it's fantastic

We have both a pc and a laptop, and my husband wanted to make the laptop the
dominant use computer. This meant transferring the ActiveSync connection my
HTC-S620 has with Outlook on the pc to a copy of Outlook on the laptop.

I synchronised the pc and the HTC to ensure that all information was
completely up-to-date, and set the pc to overwrite the device in the
eventuality of something going wrong, and my losing the data on the HTC.
Then we initialised the laptop connection, and stopped it as soon as it gave
us opportunity so that we could reset it to overwrite the laptop with the
information on the HTC.

My husband had hoped to be helpful by also initialising the email aspect,
which I have never used. An early brush with it showed me that it was going
to cause more trouble than it was worth, and the two email accounts I keep on
the phone are checked by direct connection to the email servers, using the
phone's own software, not Outlook.

Somewhere between initialising and stopping, the laptop did indeed overwrite
the device, and I lost every appointment, task and contact I had. What
really shocked and dismayed me, however, was that the HTC then overwrote the
pc when I tried to restore the information from the pc. However, my Lord
plans these things to teach me character-polishing, and He is to be praised
for it.

I spent four hours last night recovering 6 month-old deleted files from
somewhere in the Mail tab. It was the only place I could find any trace of
my missing information, and it did prove useful in enabling me to clean up a
lot of it. But now I have the next step to take, and this is what's worrying
me.

I have to hook up a phone with no information on it, and run the risk that
it will again delete everything.

I need a very secure backup of my information. Something simple, something
totally separate from the system, so it doesn't get overwritten in any
eventuality but will always be there for me to reload and try again with.
In Lotus Organiser this would have been simply a copy of the data file, but
it doesn't seem to be as simple as that with Outlook, and I'm very sorry, but
I have to say: I just don't trust your programming to do it on its own,
because I've had too many losses of data in the past with this (during the
initial setup) and with other MS programs.

I don't mind it having to be something complicated and obscure, like
creating an Excel sheet of everything (I don't have Access) - and actually,
something like that on a one-for-each-component basis would give me greater
peace of mind. I have archive stuff that we maybe only touch once every
year, or less. It doesn't need to be part of the regular backups. But it
has got to be simple and transferable and workable outside of Outlook's
internal programming. If nothing else, when I change phones, it will have to
transfer to the new phone.

I look forwards to hearing from you, but just on a quick side note: when
trying to recover my profile for this forum, I did a Google search on the
full title of my last post, for which I still had a notification email in my
Thunderbird email program. To my astonishment, I found that the entire
thread has been quoted on 14 separate websites. Some are Microsoft-based and
understandable, but others include a pc magazine. When I looked through the
terms and conditions of posting, I must have somehow missed the consent to do
that. Please could you confirm it's location?

Regards
Mrs Glenys Chew

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Long and detailed story but it allows for a short answer; make a copy of
your pst-file. This is where Outlook keeps all its data in. For all the
details about backing up and restoring Outlook see;
http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/backupandrestore.htm

Currently you can only open pst-files when Outlook is installed on that
machine. This might change in the future though later this year the pst-file
format will opened up so developers from other applications can work
directly with it without the need for Outlook being installed on that
machine.

If you like to create archives in an open format, then I can highly
recommend HTML Email Archiver. This will convert your emails into HTML files
which you browse through and open in any browser. For details see
http://addins.howto-outlook.com/mapilab_archiver
If you decide to order use "4PM76A8" to get a discount.

As for the official location of this newsgroup. On the web that is;
http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.outlook.general
In a newsreader it is;
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.outlook.general

Since this newsgroup is publicly available, many websites with "related"
content will copy the content of the official newsgroups to fill their own
forum with so it looks busy ;-)



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[Heather]

to do a backup. you need a jumpdrive-stick or an external hard-drive. then
all you have to do is copy and paste the file on this.
you'll need to find the location of the files, you cant just copy and paste
the icon ( wish you could) but there is a path to follow.. like ie.
c:\Documents and Settings\all users\start menu\programs\microsoft office.
however I dont know where yours is located. but you can try this path.

 

[Mrs G Chew]

Dear Robert and Heather

Thank you both very much for those explanations. We are doing the
flashdrive copy first to correct the laptop, and also copying the file and
moving it to our My Docs so that it will be included in the digital vault
backup.

I also noticed on a calmer look at the File menu that there is an export
function, and that in any case the detailed views of the calendar and
contacts can be cut and pasted to an Excel sheet (with a little adjusting
here and there for the few notes sections which have an overflow of text in
them). This is something that will be useful for keeping small chunks (eg,
the individual charity groups, the personal-archive, the current stuff for
the house and the current stuff for the phone) individually safe, accessible
and transferable at different times.

Thank you for being patient with my panic attack, I've no doubt it's a
question that arises at regular intervals, but I couldn't seem to find very
much help using the search I did. Perhaps I should rely a little less on
technology

God bless your year,

Regards

Mrs G Chew

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You're welcome!

Note that the export method you mentioned will most likely not be fully
recoverable back into Outlook. For that, backing up the pst-file is really
the best way to go. Your method is of course very useful to store a copy of
just that data outside of Outlook ;-)



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