Importing old Outlook contact data into new Outlook personal fold

[Casey785]

Background (please bear with me here): I had a hard drive crash and no recent
backup (I know I'm an idiot!). I finally had to have a disk recovery outfit
rescue my data. However, for reasons I won't bore you with, a couple of
months elapsed between crash and recovery of old data. During that time, I
got a new drive and reinstalled the programs, like Office 2007. So I have
data in the newer installation and older data in the previous, recovered
drive.

I need to get the old personal address book info from a backup of the old
Outlook 2007 into my new Outlook 2007 .pst folder without losing any of the
new address data. I have tried searching Help and these forums and the
Answers forums, but I think I have missed something--I cannot find anything
directly related. The Help info seems only to cover a voluntary migration to
a new computer, not a hard drive crash.

I also cannot find a personal address book file (*.pab) anywhere either in
my backup copy or my newer Outlook installation. As a matter of fact, I'm not
even sure if I'm describing this correctly!

Does any of this make sense?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Are you sure all your contacts were still in a pab-file?
pab-files have not been in use since Outlook 2000. Support for those files
has only been for backwards compatibility.

If you stored your contacts in the Contacts folder, then your contacts were
stored in a pst-file. If that has been recovered as well, you can reconnect
to it via;
File-> Open-> Outlook Data File...

You can then see what is in there and decide which items you want to copy
over.

 

[DL]

pab file has not being used in outlook for some considerable time.
Copy your old outlook data files - the *.pst(s) - to documents folder on
current PC
The largest one, probably named outlook.pst, will probably be your origonal
data file.
Within Outlook, File>Open>Data File........browse to this pst and select it.
You will now have two sets of Personal Folders in Outlook tree view, the old
file being the lower one.
Copy data from this to your current set