Backup Outlook settings

How can I backup my Outlook settings and especially my email account configuration?

How can I backup my Outlook settings and especially my email account configuration?While Microsoft offers various tools to save or transfer your settings (Office Save My Settings Wizard, File and Settings Transfer Wizard, User State Migration Tool, Windows Easy Transfer) they all have some common issues;

  • they are not Outlook specific
  • they do not contain your pst-file (especially when you relocated it)
  • they corrupt your mail profile

Granted, the Office Save My Settings Wizard was actually usable for making a backup of your settings (and only that) and then restoring it to the same machine. But again; it was not Outlook specific. It also didn’t work for restoring to another version of Office and they’ve dropped this (inreliable) feature in Office 2007.

Also because of the mail profile corruption that takes place, I always recommend to manually backup and transfer your pst-file and then manually recreate your mail profile. This however can be a very time consuming and labour intensive process and requires you to have your account configurations provided by your ISP at hand.

Luckily there is another method as well and that is by using a tool called ABF Outlook Backup. This tool can capture all your Outlook settings and configured accounts and the backup process also includes the pst-files which you have configured in Outlook.

I’ve tested the tool and couldn’t find a corruption in my mail profile. It also supports backing up and restoring across Outlook versions. This allowed me to backup a complex configuration from Outlook 2003 running on Windows XP and then restore it to Outlook 2007 running on Windows Vista without trouble.

If you decide to order ABF Outlook Backup you can use ABF-1HTJ8 to get a discount.

Sperry Software
Use "BH93RF24" to get a discount when ordering!