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Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders Backup

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:58:00 +0000

Backing up your email accounts regularly is a pretty important task and a safety measure in case something goes wrong and you cannot access the account anymore. Most users collect emails over the years and keep them just like they would keep letters that have been send to them by friends and relatives. Loosing those emails, apart from business correspondences, account information and recipes, would be an irreparable loss without a backup on another drive or media.

Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders Backup is a backup application designed by Microsoft to backup Personal Folders Files, also called .pst files. It is compatible to Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007 and every operating system these have been designed for.

Each .PST file contains all of your Outlook folders, including the Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts. You can have a single .PST file (usually called “Internet Folders” or “Personal Folders” in your Folder List), but you might also have an additional .PST file that you use for archiving (“Archiving Folders”). Personal Folders Backup lets you back up any or all of these .PST files.

The Outlook backup can be started by clicking in File > Backup in Outlook. A click on Options presents a list of all available .pst files of which all or some can be checked for backup. Afterwards a location for the backup has to be selected. I would suggest to burn the backup to CD or DVD to have it in case the hard drive has a defect.

A reminder can be set as well which reminds the user every xx days that a new backup is due. The backup can then be created, or saved as it is called in the application which writes it to the location specified in the options. The same menu provides the option to load a backup into Outlook.

Backup all email accounts in one place

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 10:10:52 +0000

How many mail accounts do you have ? Last time I counted them I had ten. Ten private and business accounts at various webmailers and servers. Ever since then I was looking for a solution to backup all my mail accounts in one go which would include the possibility to place them in a secure location such as a CD or DVD.

Mailstore Home looks very promising. It can backup emails from programs like Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird but also from webmailers (pop and imap) and even mbox files. Mails from programs that are installed on your computer can be backed up with just two clicks of the mouse while pop3 and imap require additional information such as your Gmail account information.

All mails are compressed to save disk space. Once the mails have been added they can easily be burned to CD or DVD using the same interface. The one thing that is lacking is that there is no way of scheduling backups.

Mailstore offers a fast search which is great if you want to quickly find a mail but are not sure where it was send to. All mails from all accounts can be exported in the eml format which is the Outlook Express Electronic Mail format which is supported by most mail applications.

This makes it possible to import all mail into one program in case you want to start using one program from now on. You should note however that you need to add the accounts manually in that program, only the mails are imported.

How to import and export Outlook categories

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:10:22 +0000

You decided to export your Outlook data to a new computer only to realize that all Outlook categories have not been exported. Instead of manually creating those categories again you decided to search for a solution to backup the categories on the old computer and add them again to the new pc.

Outlook categories are saved in the registry in the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office. The Outlook version that you are using determines the rest of the path. Here is a quick summary of possibilities:

8.0 \ Outlook \ Categories \ means Outlook 98
9.0 \ Outlook \ Categories \ means Outlook 2000
10.0 \ Outlook \ Categories \ means Outlook XP
11.0 \ Outlook \ Categories \ means Office 2003
12.0 \ Outlook \ Categories \ means Office 2007

All you need to do is export the categories key and import it in the new computer. To export the key right-click categories and select export from the menu. Select a file name and click on save to end the export.

Load the created file on the new computer and double-click it to import the settings. This is of course only valid if you import the categories into the same version of Outlook. If you are using a different version of Outlook you need to edit the registry key before you import the categories.