Backing Up Your Address Book In Outlook

With the relative unwieldiness of Microsoft’s Outlook email client getting harder to ignore, many erstwhile users are jumping to alternatives that are more maneuverable. For instance, Outlook stores all contacts in an address book, and people commonly discover too late that an application crash can leave their Outlook address book blank.

One of the major concerns for users is the security of their contact information, because loss of this would render his or her email communication ineffective to some degree. Thus, the need for backing up the address book becomes all the more important. Here are a few tips to help you out in the matter.

If it’s a POP3 or IMAP account

If all the information you have is in the namesake folder, all you will need is a backup of the existing PST file. This file is the primary record that Outlook keeps for all information that you choose to store locally in the computer, such as your emails, calendar items, tasks, notes journal items, etc.

When it’s an Exchange account

In this case, the contacts are not stored locally inside the PST file, but on the Exchange server online. Therefore, you will have to count on your email administrator to back these up for you. They may be already doing this periodically, but you can always get in touch with them to be sure.

For a Hotmail Connector account

Your contact information on Hotmail servers is backed up periodically, but if you do not trust Microsoft with this, it is better to make your own backups occasionally. You will have to create your own Backup Contacts PST file for this. The steps listed below will show you how

Instructions

• Navigate to the Outlook Data File. To get there in the 2007 version, open File, and then click on New. In the 2010 version, click on the Home button, followed by New Items, and More Items options.
• Go to Contacts Navigation, or if you are using version 2002 or older, just choose your Contacts folder. Right click on this, assuming it is what you want backed up, and click on Copy Folder option on the context menu.
• You will get a popup menu here, choose the Backup Contacts folder set, and then confirm the choice. Repeat the last two steps for every folder you want to back up.
• When done, exit the program and find the newly made PST file on the default system location.

These are three different ways to backup and secure your Outlook address book. If you hit a bump on any of them, call us and we will walk you through it.