Now I've done it - did I lose my wife's address book???

[Felecha]

Now I've done it.

My wife uses Outlook for her email. I have always used Outlook Express and felt that the full Outlook was too big and cumbersome - all I wanted was email. But when she got a laptop for her work at the school where she's an administrator, the IT guy there convinced her it was much better. The school has an educational license for Office 2000, which is what they gave her to install on the new laptop.

I recently got it so I could connect to her laptop here at home on our little LAN. We both run XP now, and until I got XP I had a puzzle figuring out why I could not connect to hers. I also recently got a big new hard drive with lots of space and thought - hey, why not start backing up her email files down here in my office on my machine. A couple of times in the past she has lost her emails, and they are HUGE both in numbers and importance, and so I thought that would be good.

I started by using Windows Explorer to copy from hers to a backup directory here. Then since I've been learning to write batch files, I tried that and it seemed to work, so I've made a shortcut on the desktop for it. Once a week, when I know she's not using it, I do the batch to copy, and walk away.

copy "\\Susan\C\Documents and Settings\Susan.SUSAN\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.pst" c:\SusanBackup\outlook.pst

The .pst file is 900MB (!!!)

Well, after doing it twice OK as far as I know, last night I did it, and this morning I woke up to an email from her - "Do you know what happened to my address book?"

I went up and looked and sure enough, it seems to be empty. I have to suspect something went wrong with the copy. But what???

I know that in OE there are .mbx files for each folder, and a .wab file for the OE address book. When I looked for them at first, I found Outlook seems to be different, so I just copied the .pst file

Today I find in a Google search that there is a .pab file that's used for addresses. I've searched her hard drive and not found any .pab files.

So I'm in a pickle here. Any help?

Thanks

 

[ValuedCustomer]

If she's running XP why not try a System Restore to a week or so ago?

 

[Felecha]

Well, I think there's a new piece of the puzzle. I forgot that a week ago when playing around with the backup idea I downloaded Microsoft's "Personal Folder Backup" add-in, which looked like it would automate the job. But I couldn't get it to do what I thought I wanted (my memory is a bit fuzzy on what I did then). But maybe when I installed it and did whatever I did with it, something happened that I didn't understand. Here's the thing -

Looking at her Folders pane in Outlook, I see that she has TWO "Personal Folders" sections, each with an inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Sent Items, etc. The second one has all the good old contacts in "Contacts". They still don't show up as available in the dropdown box when you create a new mail and want to select who to send to. But they are there at least, and not totally lost.

The "Personal Folders" just above it has emails in it dating from a week ago, which would be when I fiddled with the Personal Folders Backup. Maybe at that time it created a new "Personal Folders" section and Outlook started using that.

it would be great if I could just copy everything from the newer Personal Folders Section into the old one, and somehow point Outlook to go back to using the older section, but I can't find where to set that. I hesitate at this point to go poking around and clicking things. If I follow my idea I would end up deleting the newer Personal Folders section, and deleting is something I want to be pretty sure about when it asks me "Are you SURE you want to do this?"

Outlook is very confusing to a simple old OE country boy like me.


And if I did a Restore, would she lose the last week's worth of emails? Hundreds of them, really.

 

[Felecha]

Well, after much frustrating poking around in Help and various dialog boxes I just went ahead and moved all the contents and closed the first Personal Folders section and set the second to be the POP recipient (how in the world did the new PR section get set to be the POP recipient???) and after restarting it seems to be ok now.

But curious stuff still - there was a new pst file, PersonalFolders(1).pst that was very small, and created at the time that was the same as when the copy by batch file was done last night,and the outlook.pst had not grown since then. It makes me think that when I ran the copy batch from my machine, the Outlook program on hers tried to do something, found the file locked, created a new one and moved over to that new one.

But there were emails in the folders in the new section that go back a week - which was the time when I installed the backup utility.

So there's some very puzzling stuff, tiresome detective work for a rookie.

 

[Sforsyth]

isn't a address book a WAD file or something I have one saved on a disc I'll look

 

[Felecha]

OE uses .wab files for Address Book. Far as I can tell, the Contact list is part of the pst file in Outlook

 

[Sforsyth]

thats it WAB sorry I have one full of places and fax #'s on a DVD about 200 places that I MASS fax my resume out to every few months.