HowTo-Outlook

Whereas it is quite easy to set or change the location of pst-files belonging to a POP3 account, changing the location of the ost-file for an Exchange, Outlook.com or IMAP account is much more troublesome.

This can lead to issues as these files can grow quite large and the disk or partition on which you have Windows installed might not be accommodated for that. Especially if you invested in a fast SSD-drive, you usually don’t have GBs of space to waste and rather locate this data on your larger data drive.

While you can force the location of ost-files via Registry value, you’ll need to remove and re-add the account and download all mail again.

An effective and more direct solution is to use Symbolic Links. While the matter around them and how they function is quite complex, using them is luckily fairly easy and they are a very effective solution for this issue.

Continue reading: Moving the ost-file of an Exchange, Outlook.com or IMAP account

Every now and then, the following story reaches us;

Today when I started Outlook, I got the error that my pst-file was missing and Outlook would not start. I checked the location where my pst-file should have been but indeed it wasn’t there. My last backup is from months ago so that is not a lot of help.

Outlook was working just fine yesterday.

What happened and is there any way that I can still recover my Outlook data?

While nothing works better than having your backups in order, all might not be lost yet if you had your pst-file stored on a disk with Previous Versions protection enabled. This however does require you to be using Windows Vista or Windows 7. Windows XP users will require additional tools which is discussed later in this guide as well.

The methods described below also work for pst-files that you have accidentally overwritten or have been damaged beyond the repair capabilities of the Inbox Repair Tool (scanpst.exe).

Continue reading: Recover deleted pst-files via Previous Versions