Outlook Contacts Lost - Are they gone forever?

[Karen]

A colleague is changing PCs and needed her contacts moved from one computer
to another. I've done the export exercise in the past without luck. This
time, we decided to move her contacts to a separate folder (to preserve the
existing contacts in case of corruption) and copy that folder onto a thumb
drive. Used the "create folder" option on the drop down menu, created the
folder, and when I clicked Okay, only one contact was moved to the new
folder. Went to the old folder to try to move the lot, and everything was
gone. Only that one contact remained.

There was no warning note of "are you sure you want to delete all files" or
anything like that; looked high and low; had our system administrator search
the server, they are just gone.

How is this possible? By the way, this isn't the first time I've lost
contacts - in a pc to mac conversion, the import/export feature completely
lost them all. What a nightmare.

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP (OneNote)]

What version of Outlook are you using? Creating a folder shouldn't move
ANY Contact items by itself.

--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.officeforlawyers.com

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

You might want to start by reading the countless posts here that tell you
how to migrate Outlook data correctly. What you did bears no resemblance to
the correct methods and will continue to lose your data. You never use
Import/Export to transfer Outlook data. If for some reason you are unable to
read other posts before you make your own, this will get you started:
http://www.slipstick.com/config/backup.htm
http://www.howto-outlook.com/Howto/backupandrestore.htm
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010771141033.aspx