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BhevesY's avatar
BhevesY
Iron Contributor
Sep 28, 2025

Getting Outlook contacts from savefiles

I am currently working as a private support technician and today someone walked in with a Windows 10 PC that would not boot. After trying to repair Windows we decided to make a Backup from the whole hard drive and reinstall Windows. We reinstalled all his programs. Also Office. We set up the IMAP and SMTP Servers correctly but we are not sure if he was using Pop3 or IMAP we decided on setting up IMAP now. Everything fine. Now he has called us to complain that all his contacts are missing. So I went through the backup but can’t find any contacts. Where does Outlook safe contacts?

I tried
C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming
C:\Users\User\Contacts (Some contacts but not all, the customer says he saved the contacts once manually there to back-up.)

Is are there any other location they could be?

Thanks for reading

1 Reply

  • Perez's avatar
    Perez
    Iron Contributor
    Oct 21, 2025

    In Outlook, contacts are typically stored in the Personal Storage Table (.pst) files or in Offline Storage (.ost) files if you're using an Exchange account. Since your client was using IMAP, their contacts could have been stored locally in a PST file or synchronized with a cloud service like Outlook.com, Office 365, or Exchange.