[SOLVED] Trouble transferring from Outlook 2010 to Office 365

xandor123

Distinguished
Feb 27, 2008
72
2
18,545
I just finished building a new computer for a friend of mine and I've run into some trouble moving to the new outlook. I'll try to summarize the best I can below.

To prep for this, I copied all of the data files over to the hard drive I was transferring to the new computer and pointed outlook to those new files on the D drive. I also did an export of her address book. Just before I transferred the drive, outlook was working perfectly with the intended behavior that we want below.

1: She uses outlook primarily for her work email on a custom domain. She also has a second work email and a personal Gmail account that goes through outlook. I've got those all ported in and they're up to date. What we're missing is all of her old emails. Stuff that dates back many years. So far, only the last 18 months or so show up. How do I set outlook to pull all email history?

2: Prior to the move, she had all of her emails nicely sorted into folders. It wasn't an automated thing, but she had a folder hierarchy set up. Once I moved everything, that folder structure disappeared. How do I get those folders and contents back? And would this in any way be related to the issue above (as in the old emails being in those folders not getting ported over)?

3: She created and modified several people in her contacts list, and those new changes aren't showing up in what we're seeing now.

I'm assuming that this is all due to settings that aren't configured properly. The info that we're missing is absolutely vital for her to be able to work, so I'm hoping there's an easy way to retrieve everything. Also, if it makes a difference, I tried plugging the hard drive back into the old computer and starting up outlook. It contained the same information that's on the new one.

Thanks for the help!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
In 2010 Outlook, all data (calendar, contacts, email, etc) is kept into a single .PST file. If you've copied that file over to the new Outlook installation, you'd have all this old info. And just don't tell us that you did not made a backup of her "absolutely vital info" prior to reusing the hard drive in the new PC.
 

xandor123

Distinguished
Feb 27, 2008
72
2
18,545
That's just it though. I copied over 4 different .PST files, one for each of her 3 email addresses and then one bigger file. Originally, these were all located on her C drive. After I relocated them to the D drive, I pointed Outlook to the new files and everything worked exactly as intended. It wasn't until I moved the D drive to the new computer and loaded up Office 365 that things went weird.

So the thing is, I KNOW the info is in there somewhere, but I just can't find it. She was using Outlook up until the moment I relocated the hard drive. She was making updates to contacts and making new ones, had access to all her old emails, and her file structure was intact. The only thing that changed was the physical location of the hard drive and the version of Outlook used.