Email Help - PST Files: Exporting / Importing

[Music] hi my name's Spencer and I'm gonna talk about PST files today I'm going to talk about what they are why you would need one how to export and also how to import them utilizing Outlook alright so let's start off with what is a PST file well it stands for personal storage table it's your local backup of everything that has to do with your mailbox there on your computer so why would you need one well let's say you accidentally delete something you need a place to restore that from that would be your PST file or let's say you're migrating data from one email account to another you would also utilize a PST file for that so let's take a look at how to export that data and actually create the PST file so I'm here in Outlook 2016 and you can see I've got a dummy account set up here I've got my mail folders here I can come down here I shouldn't have anything on my calendar no contacts oh this is gonna go really fast for me but if you've got a lot of data plan on it taking a little bit so if I want to go through and do an actual export I'm gonna come up here to file I have an option here for open and export and then you'll see import / export I'm gonna click on that and a little wizard is gonna come up alright so I'm gonna come on this list I'm going to find export to a file and click Next and I'm gonna export into a PST file if you're just doing contacts or maybe your calendar events you might want to do the comma separated values but most people just go ahead and do the dot PST file something to also note if you do this on a Mac it's gonna actually export as a OLM file but they're essentially the same thing just different operating system so I'm gonna hit next all right and it's gonna ask me what I want to export I'm actually gonna choose the email address up here at the top because I want to export everything associated with this email account if you just choose inbox only the inbox is gonna export and the same with all of these but I'm gonna choose the email account I'm gonna say include all these subfolders and I'm gonna click Next it's then gonna ask me where I want to save this file to by default it's gonna go into your documents and outlook files but if you want to throw it on your desktop so you can easily find it just as long as you know where to find it I'm gonna leave it as the default as the backup PST and then it's gonna ask me what I want if I want to export duplicates there's nothing in this PST file at this time so I'm just gonna go ahead and leave it at the default of replace duplicates all right it's gonna ask you for a password this is optional if you want to password protect that file you can definitely put in a password here I'm not gonna password protect it so I'm just gonna hit ok so then gonna go through the process of doing the export and if a you have a large mailbox it's gonna pop up a window and let you know how long it's gonna take roughly there was really nothing in this mailbox so it's already actually done now if I want to go ahead and move over to another profile if you're going to a different email account you can do that at this point to go ahead and do the import I'm just gonna use this same one so I'm gonna show you how to import the file now so I'm gonna go back up here to file same process open and export go to import / export but this time I'm going to import from another program or file and click Next and we export it to a PST file so I'm going to choose that the file I'm importing is also a PST file click Next and then I would hit browse and go find that file I left it as the default so it's just gonna automatically have that here but I'll click here for browse so you can see here's my backup file I'm gonna click open and I'm gonna allow duplicates to be created just so that you can see that it actually imported the data but if I told it to either replace duplicates or not import duplicates you won't see anything happen because I'm importing it to the same account but I'm gonna allow duplicates and hit next it's then gonna ask me what I want to import so you can pick and choose what you want to import I'm gonna import everything that was associated with that PST file so I'm just gonna leave it at the outlook data file line up here at the top and include all subfolders and if I were to click this import to the current folder it would everything would just go into my inbox I want it to import to the same set of folders so inbox to inbox sent to sent deleted to deleted so I'm gonna make sure I choose the email account that I want it to go to here and click finish ok it's then gonna do the import again if you have a large PST file you're gonna get a status line here telling you how long it's gonna take but you'll see that I now have a second copy of this message because the import completed and you'll see these numbers here doubled up as well so I have now completed that import and it's really that simple there's also documentation online if you are going to import through a Mac you can import a PST file on Outlook for a Mac same as doing those OLM files you just can't import an OLM file into a Windows outlook so it only works one way there all right so that's how you do an import in Outlook now there are some situations where you would want to do an export but you don't necessarily want to import it into your email account that you currently have set up in Outlook so I'm gonna show you real quick how do you open that file so that you can see what's in that local archive that you just made and also you may do that to verify the data is in there so inside of Outlook what you're gonna do is you're gonna come back up here to file you're gonna go to open and export you'll see the option right above that import/export it says open outlook data file so you're gonna click on that it's gonna bring up the default outlook files folder here this is where I saved mine but if you saved here somewhere else on the computer you're gonna have to go find that file I'm gonna click my backup file I'm gonna hit OK and you'll see it's gonna populate over here on left hand side just like you have another account in Outlook you can expand it see all the folders that you export it and all your data is going to be there let's say you don't want to see that anymore you can right-click it and you can close the outlook data file and it will disappear and just be there on your computer you can open it at any time so it's as easy as that now if you have any questions or you're running into any issues and you're also a customer of ours here at cloud office at Rackspace you can login to your control panel there's a phone number there at the top as well as a chat feature you also have access to our email help tool at email help Rackspace comm there are also the other walkthroughs that are here on our YouTube channel so until next time have a great rest of your day [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Rackspace Cloud Office

Views: 54,181

Keywords: Rackspace, Rackspace Email, Email, Outlook, Microsoft, Office 365, Technology, PST Files, PST, Backup, Data, Exporting, Importing, Backup Email, Email Backup, Recover Email, Recover, Rackspace Email Backup

Id: 49cHpL4rsVw

Length: 7min 57sec (477 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2017