How to Backup your Outlook PST File

This is a 4 minute video illustrating how to keep your Outlook data safe in the event of a computer software or hardware malfunction.

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Closed Caption:

hi my name is Maura thomas from regain
your time calm and today i want to show
you how to backup your PST file because
i find that it's something a lot of
people don't know how to do but i think
it's very important if you don't know
your PST file is the file that contains
all of the information that you have
stored in outlook so all of your emails
all your contacts all of your calendar
appointments anything you have in
outlook lives in your PST file so if
you're using outlook to run your life
then it's really important to have this
information backed up so the first thing
we need to do is locate the file it's
not so easy to discover so that you
can't accidentally delete it but the way
that you find it is you want to go up to
file and select data file management and
this is outlook 2007 but it looks almost
exactly the same in 2003 so once you've
selected data file management you want
to have make sure that you have the data
files tab selected so click on data
files and then you see personal folders
so you want to select that by clicking
it once left-click once and then you
want to select open folder and this will
show you where on your computer your
outlook file lives so now that we have
this folder open we can minimize this
for a minute because we can't back the
file if it's open so we have to exit out
of outlook
ok now you can right-click on outlook
and select copy and I suggest that you
put it on some sort of external drive
now you can see this is only 513
kilobytes I wanted it to copy fast so i
used a very small PST file you need to
pay attention to how big your file is
and then I would suggest that you use an
external hard drive or flash drive
just make sure that once you notice how
big it is make sure that flash drive
that external drive has enough room on
it to store the file so I've plugged in
an external flash drive USB flash drive
so now that i've copied the file I just
need to navigate to that fly
shot i'll go over to my computer and i
will select that flash drive which it's
here called removable disk so i'll
double-click on removable disk and then
I have a folder created called the
outlook backup so double click on that
and then I've backed up this file before
so it's there's already a copy there but
I want this to be a new backup so I'm
just going to right-click and select
paste and i will replace the file and
now it's backed up and as i mentioned i
have this is a very small PST file yours
is probably very large and if it's very
large it will probably take a fair
amount of time to copy over
however because all your important
information is stored in it i would
recommend that you do it at least once a
week
set it to copy onto a flash drive and
then take off and go to lunch
you don't want to do it in the middle of
your work day because it will take too
long but despite how long it takes i
would suggest that you do it about once
a week at least
so a lot of people don't know about this
feature down here called safely remove
hardware if you've got a flash drive
installed before you unplug it
this is really the way that you should
do it so you go down here to this green
arrow and you double-click any selects
the storage device and you select stop
and then it will give you these choices
which are really all the same thing i'll
just select USB flash memory and select
ok and then now it says safe to remove
hardware so once you've done all that
your outlook file is backed up and if
you have some sort of computer
malfunction you can trust that your
information in outlook is protected so
that's how to backup your PSD file i
hope you found it helpful
you can find more tips on my website at
www time com and you can follow me on
twitter at em and Thomas hope to see you
there thanks for watching