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Full Disk Restore did not restore my Outlook contacts

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Thankfully, I had a full backup and I was able to recover my system! Backups are cheap,  when you need one. Anyway, after the restore my Outlook directory was empty. Fortunately I had a backup of that!

Is this normal with an Acronis backup/restore or did I miss a setting somewhere.

Thanks, Bob

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HI bioya1 what backup scheme/type did you make where the backup did not capture it (disk, partition, or file/folder) and what backup scheme/type did you make that did have the files captured?  

Yes, some Outlook files are exempted by Microsoft VSS by default!  Also, Outlook and other Office files may be committed only into memory at the time of backup and not saved to disk yet.  

check this info out from Acronis and Microsoft:

https://kb.acronis.com/content/48032

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/backup/registry-keys-for-backup-and-restore

You may want to consider taking a full disk backup "offline" with rescue media from time to time as well - just in case. 

Hi,

Thanks for your great response! My backup was a full disk backup (C:/). Fortunately I also backup my Outlook contacts so I am healed! One curious thing is that the Outlook restore did not restore my various mail groups, but that is minor compared to losing it all.

Bob

Well, at least you're back in business!  Did you check the registry setting in 

https://kb.acronis.com/content/48032

to see if you could exempt the Outlook files from the default exclusion that Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS - it's what backup products typically use to image your OS while it is active)?  If it's there and you remove it, it might start backing up the outlook files in the full disk backup as well.

For what it's worth, this is a fairly common issue in a lot of backup products since they generally use VSS.  There is a specific outlook backup in Acronis as well that will backup the information from your account if you keep the data on the server too.  I used to only do POP3 to to the local machine and then realized that using iMAP was better because it kept the original mail and contacts on the server too.

Eventually, I just committed my main email to be in Gmail (online) as the contacts and recovery features are pretty robust, even though I was using Outlook with a PST to archive the mail and backing that up.