Missing contacts in outlook 2019

Question

I had to restore my Outlook profile and when completed, the contacts never loaded. I exported the contacts from Gmail into a CSV file and loaded them, however there are many contacts missing. I do not have an archive file on my local drive, any thoughts on how I may be able to recover my missing contacts from my .OST file on my local drive. I have already run the repair tool on the file and there were no issues found.

Let me know if more background is needed, greatly appreciate any recommendations the community may have.

Thanks

Answer 1

To recover missing contacts from your .OST file in Outlook 2019, you can follow these steps:

1. Check for Corruption: Since you've already run the repair tool without issues, ensure that your .OST file is not corrupted. If you suspect it might still be, consider creating a new .OST file by removing the existing one and allowing Outlook to recreate it.
2. Recover Items: If you have run the Inbox Repair Tool, you can try to recover items from the rebuilt .OST file. To do this, create a new Personal Folders (.pst) file in your profile and then move any recovered items to this new file. This can help in retrieving items that may have been lost during the profile restoration.
3. Use the Lost and Found Folder: After running the repair tool, check the "Lost and Found" folder in the recovered items. This folder may contain folders and items that were recovered during the repair process. Items missing from this folder may be beyond repair.
4. Export and Import: If you still have access to your Gmail contacts, consider exporting them again and ensuring that the CSV file is formatted correctly for Outlook. Sometimes, issues arise from incorrect formatting during the import process.

If these steps do not resolve the issue, you may need to consider third-party recovery tools designed for Outlook data recovery, but proceed with caution and ensure they are reputable.

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References:

• How to repair your Outlook personal folder file (.pst)
• Synchronization problems occur in Outlook and in Outlook Web App

Answer 2

I get how stressful it feels when your contacts don’t show up after restoring Outlook.

The reason this happens is that Outlook stores contacts in your mailbox, not directly in the .OST file, so when the profile was rebuilt, it only synced what was on the server.

If some contacts were saved locally or never synced, they won’t come back automatically.

Since you’ve already run the repair tool and don’t have a PST backup, the next step is to check if those contacts still exist in the OST.

You can use a tool like MFCMAPI or an OST-to-PST converter to look inside the file and export any missing contacts.

Before going that route, can you confirm if these contacts were originally created in Outlook or imported from Gmail before?

Also, do you still have access to the Gmail account to re-export them if needed?

Regards,
Aron