How Outlook Stores your Data

Outlook is basically a flat-file database. As you create new e-mails, or as new e-mails are received, or when you create and save a new item in an Outlook folder, Outlook adds the new item to the location identified as the primary store. The exact location depends on how you configured Outlook when it was installed on your computer. Usually, your Personal Folders file (username.pst for example) is stored on your local computer in your 'My Documents' folder.

Outlook data files (.pst)
drive:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

If you are not connected to an Exchange Server, your e-mails, calendar, and other items are delivered to and stored locally in a personal folder (.pst) file. The letters pst stand for Personal Storage Table.

The following are other commonly referenced files with the various versions of Outlook.

Offline Folders file (.ost)
drive:\Documents and Settings\< username >\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

Personal Address Book (.pab)
drive:\Documents and Settings\< username >\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

Offline Address Books (.oab)
drive:\Documents and Settings\< username >\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

Outlook contacts nicknames (.nk2)
drive:\Documents and Settings\< username >\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

Recovering Outlooks PST, OST and other such data from laptops and computers that have had failed hard drives, become inaccessible, unbootable hard disk, or has corrupted data, requires extensive training and sophisticated equipment to rebuild and restore good, usable data. ADR Data Recovery has been in the hard drive data recovery business for over 12 years and successfully recovers critical data from laptops, servers, and RAID servers every day.

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