MS Outlook, backing up for formatting

[YayYay]

Hi, I want to save everything in my outlook folders from the inbox and the sent items, format my computer then reinstall and putting back my old messages. Any idea on how this is done? I have looked in the help section and found nothing on it.

 

[PliotronX]

There's probably a more simple way to do it (like some kind of program that exports files and settings), but this is how I do it. Backup all files in windows\application data\microsoft\outlook

 

[mundania]

I went through this before, and lost quite a bit of old e-mails, but I think I finally have it down. Do a search for "outlook.pst" which is where all your e-mails are stored. If you use outlook quite a bit, it should be a sizeable file. Mine's around 50 MBytes. It saves your Contact Information and the like, I'm not quite sure about Calendar, Notes, and Tasks.

If you have Rules, you need to export from Rules Wizard, because Outlook doesn't save that information in outlook.pst for some reason.

Good luck!

 

[FOBSIDE]

FILE -> IMPORT AND EXPORT -> EXPORT TO A FILE -> PERSONAL FOLDER FILE(.PST)

that's it. make sure you export all your folder and subfolders. you can click as high up on the hierarchy as you would like and there is a selection for subfolders. when you reformat and load outlook again, follow the same steps but import from the file. ive done this dozens of times and it hasnt failed me.

one note tho: if you keep exporting to the same file name every time you backup your outlook, there is an option to keep adding to the existing .pst file you have. so stuff you thought you deleted is still in the .pst file and it gets imported again. it scared me the first time i did it because i thought i imported an old copy and i had non of my recent emails or contacts. to avoid this theres an option to overwrite the whole file rather than adding to it. then theres also just saving it to a different file name.