I am trying to help my aunt recover some old emails and contacts she has in outlook express. She backed up her entire harddrive onto an external before it crashed. now that it is back up and running I am trying to find out where her old outlook data is, so i can restore it. I never use outlook so if anyone has any idea where this data might be stored (file names or directories) it would be alot of help. normally i dont think would have been that hard but everything over here is literally french, so i dont have the comfort of knowing what a file is by its name.
That sucks...the problem with express is that it doesn't save the emails in a standard format. It has it's own. .dbx as I recall They may have changed it. You'll need to do a search for that file type and import it manually. Oh, and you'll need to tell windows to show hidden files. If that doesn't work, PM me and I can give you more info.
contacts would be stored in a .PAB file usually....do a search on your C:\ drive with the option of searching in hidden folders, and personal folders are saved as .PST files So search *.PAB then *.PST o wait that might just be outlook
I'm going to assume you're using Windows XP. This is what I would do for a full "outlook," but not outlook express. The data path's might change slightly for OE. You can give it a try, though. 1) First, you're going to have to show hidden files and folders. Open a folder and go to Tools > Folder Options > View (TAB) > Click radial button "show hidden files and folders." Click "Apply to All Folders" on the top, click the "Apply" button in the bottom right, and click "OK" in the bottom left. 2) Browse to C:\documents and settings\%username%\local settings\application data\microsoft\Outlook. Her data will be in a .PST file, named after her Outlook Profile. You can open this data file in outlook using the "File > Open > Outlook data file" command.
Thanks for the help. I was mistaken it is just normal Outlook. I did a search for the .dbx files and I found a few of them. I will have to switch the settings so that i can see the hidden files/folders and i think i will find the contacts too (.pab). now the problem I am having is how do i import the .dbx files into outlook. I have tried the file/import/Outlook 5.0 however it does not see the files I want it to import, and as far as i can tell there is no way to manually direct it to them. I do not think that i can just copy them into the normal storeage folder w/o overwriting the existing emails. Things would be slighlty easier if they werent in French AARRGGG!!!!
I found the .WAB file which contains all of the contacts, and i can open this with the standalone WAB client. however i do not know how to import this into outlook.
