Outlook 365 backup not working properly

I'm glad you were able to arrive at a solution.

Brian,

Thank you for your assistance and patience.

I re-read the link (https://www.slipstick.com/problems/pst-repair/c.... ) in your first response to my initial query in this thread and within it found the reference to Stellar OST software. I downloaded the free trial version of the basic OST conversion to PST software and it not only created a PST version of my entire Outlook mailbox (I haven't found any empty folders), but also recovered the emails I thought I had lost.

Although relatively expensive, I have decided, for peace of mind, to purchase the software.

Thank you again for your assistance and for guiding me to this solution.

Chris

Make sure you subscribe to the folders you want to be able to save or visit them first so they sync locally.

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and it's for outgoing messages. It's how clients send mail to mail transports and mail transports interact with each other. IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is an incoming protocol.

Thank you, Brian.

I like the concept of keeping annual Outlook files on my hard drive, so I have done the following:

• Set Outlook to Work Offline
• Created a new .pst file by:
  • Selecting from the Inbox:
    • New Items > More Items > Outlook Data File
    • Named the .pst file created
    • Selected OK
• Copied the Inbox (with folders and sub-folders) from my "active", frequently-used IMAP/SMTP account (I'm not sure what SMTP stands for, or what it does.) to my newly-created .pst file
• Opened the newly-created .pst file

In my newly-created .pst file I am able to see the email content of most folders and sub-folders, but some are empty. As implied, I refer to folders which in my "active" email account contain emails - in most cases, quite a few emails - however, some folders containing a lot of emails have copied successfully. Do you know why this would be?

I hope you can shed some light on this.

Chris

Hi. I'm Brian and I will do my best to help you.

Backup is different depending on the account type. For a POP account, simply copying the PST while Outlook is closed (this is important) should be enough. The PST includes all your folders. If you have multiple PSTs, copy them all. You can just open them in Outlook to recover the data they contain.

For an IMAP account, it's pointless copying the OST, since it can be opened only with the original mail profile it was connected to. Trying to open it again in Outlook won't work. There are commercial OST to PST conversion tools that can help and you can find some of them listed here: https://www.slipstick.com/problems/pst-repair/c.... This site belongs to an Office MVP and is safe to access.

A better way, perhaps, is to export or copy the folders in Outlook to a PST. That's mentioned in the Slipstick article as well. If your IMAP folders contain folders marked with "This computer only," those are the ones to concentrate on. Since IMAP data is kept on the server, except for the "This computer only" folders, if you had to recreate the mail account, all the folders containing mail will reappear as they were. The non-mail folders, since they're local, will be where the danger of losing data will lie.

An approach to make MAP a little easier to handle is to add a PST, make it the default data file, then copy the contents of the IMAP non-mail folders to the corresponding folders in the PST. You can then make backups of that data simply by copying the PST with Outlook closed. This will allow a quick recovery.

For an Exchange account (such as is used by an Outlook.com or Microsoft 365 account), all the data is kept on the server so that if anything were to happen to the account on the client side, re-adding the account in Outlook will restore all the data. You can, however, if you wish, export the mailbox to a PST or copy the folders to a PST as a backup. If you trust the server, that may be more trouble that you want to go through.

If you have any questions about what I've said, write back.