If you’ve ever had to copy everything from one to computer to another you will know that it can be annoying, not only that but there is usually something you will always forget! Copying your email from one machine to another (or to the same machine if you need to format!) is actually very easy once you know where everything is! When copying your email and contacts in outlook you only need to worry about 2 folders:
- 1 – The folder that contains your .pst file, this is the file that stores all your email and all your contacts and also your rules.
- 2 – The folder that contains your .nk2 and .srs files, these contain the autocomplete list.
First things first, lets make a note of your account settings. Load up outlook and click on Tools > Account Settings. Depending which version of Outlook your using you will need to either click next or just double click your account name to bring up the settings. You need to make a note of:
- - incoming / outgoing mail server name or address
- - username and password
Your name and email address im hoping you can already remember! If you do not know your password there is a nice free tool that can recover starred passwords (which are stored in the registry!) download revelation here
Next, close down outlook and load up my computer. At this point you need to have “show hidden files and folders” enabled. If you dont have this then load up my computer, click tools > folder options > click the view tab and about half way down you should see the ‘Show Hidden files and folders’ tickbox, click it and ok the settings.
Now, browse to the local disk drive, click documents and settings, then click on the folder that is the same as your username (if your logged in as dave click on the dave folder!) go to > local settings > application data > microsoft. Copy the ‘outlook’ folder and paste it to an external drive (usb, network drive etc).
Next, go back a few directories until your in your documents and settings > username folder. Now click on application data > microsoft. Copy the outlook folder from here and paste it to an external drive, you will need to stick it in a different named folder since its called the same as the previous folder we just copied! put it in a folder called ‘outlook cache’ or something.
Ok were done copying the folders so now lets assume you have your new computer or recently formatted computer ready to use. Fire up outlook and create your profile, put your account settings that you wrote down earlier in and ok it all. Now once you’ve set your account up make sure you close down outlook before it has chance to do its initial send and receive! (You’ll see why in a minute!)
Now, you need to copy the two outlook folders that you backed up to an external drive, to the same folders on the new computer. The folders will already exist since we’ve created our profile so just overwrite them both. Once you’ve done this load up outlook and voila! all your emails, contacts and autocomplete list will be restored. If you had rules you may need to edit them to work again, simply go in each one and untick the “only for this computer” condition and they should all work fine.
And thats it, your done! The alternative way of doing this is to use the import feature within outlook, however I find this way to be quicker. Also since we were replacing the outlook folders here, if we had of done a send / receive to begin with then we would have lost the emails it would first received!
Note: You can copy outlook 2003 folders to outlook 2007 and they will all work fine. I believe you can do the opposite aswell if you needed to (outlook 2007 to 0utlook 2003). Outlook 2000 im not sure about although I seem to recall they are in the same format as outlook 2003 and will import / export from one to the other without any issues.
