Copied Contact to new PST. Lost Linked contacts. How to restore?

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Had to create a new Outlook.Pst file to archive the old one: some messages
could not be deleted, said I lacked permissions to alter them. Everything
seems fine, but the links between my Contact v-cards and my lists are all
lost. How can I restore them or retrieve from the old PST file without
recreating thousands of links?? (Using Outlook 2000; upgrades will not help
me here. Retained the old PST file intact.)
 
So how did you "restore" your PST?
Make sure you just open it and set it as your default. Sounds like you did
something else, like import it. That's a sure way to lose data.
 
No, I did not import it. Thanks for asking. First, in the old outlook.pst,
managed to move the offending message folder into the top-level Deleted
folder. I still could not delete it, but the only copy was in that top-level
folder.

I created a source.pst. (Naturally, it had its own top-level Deleted
folder, which was happily empty.) Then I copied each top-level folder from
the old outlook.pst into source.pst, including the Contacts folder. For the
top-level folders in source.pst, under properties, I checked off
“Automatically generate Microsoft Exchange views.†For the whole source.pst,
under advanced, I “Allow upgrade to large tables.â€

Then I shut off Outlook, renamed outlook.pst to outlook.hold, and renamed
source.pst to outlook.pst.

The first thing I noticed was that all of the Inbox folders references in my
message management Rules were unspecified, and I spent about an hour
rebuilding them. I thought that would be the result of copying a top-level
Inbox. Now I find that all the links between the thousands of Contacts are
also lost, but that is in the same top-level folder, so links were lost among
the elements of a folder I coped as a single unit.

Now of course that all is done, as I went through my notes this morning I
searched for a Microsoft article I used a reference on how to resolve this
problem, and I found this instead:
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=832562. It would have
directly resolved my problem rather than going through the long procedure I
used.

I suppose the question now becomes this: can I resolve the situation as it
stands, or must I drop back to the old folder, attempt to salvage it
according to the Knowledgebase article, and then copy the changes and updates
over the past couple of days into the result? I must say that after many
years, my outlook.pst has become quite complex, and even copying the only new
messages, etc, from one folder to another will become an all-day procedure.
 
That would break links for sure. You never rename a PST file. That corrupts
the profile's connection to its default data source.
If you want links retained, you simply reuse a PST file and set it as the
default within Outlook's Data File Management dialog.
 
Ok, I understand that: I can’t rename the PST without breaking the links.
But does that break the links inside the PST? I mean, I can search links
inside an archive file. But then, I suppose the archive file is a daughter
of outlook.pst.

So I’m back to my original problem. Can I use the instructions in KB 832562
for Microsoft Exchange in a Microsoft Outlook Professional setting to delete
the offending message folder in my original PST file? That would leave some
orphaned messages and journal entries that I would have to copy over, but
it’s a small price to pay for keeping all the legacy links and rules.

If I can’t do that, I need to either find some way to maintain the links in
a new PST file, or else I have to retain the fouled messages for which I have
insufficient permissions to delete them.

Can I create a new outlook.pst in another directory, repeat the entire
procedure that I followed to create my source.pst (copying all the desirable
top-level folders – Contacts, Inbox, Journal, Task, etc.) from the old
outlook.pst – in other words, have two files opened with the same name, but
in separate directories?

How would you handle this problem?

Many thanks for your assistance, Russ. – Alcuin
 
Russ Valentine said:
State the reason you can't just do what I've posted (twice).
--
Click to expand...

Alcuin replies:
Ok. I dropped back 3 months to find an old Outlook.pst that did not have
the fouled messages.

From my current Outlook.pst (the renamed PST file), I updated all the
messages, calendar events, journal entries, and tasks.

However, I have over 2,000 Contacts, and I could not find which were updated
and which were not. When I copied them from the new folder into the old one
with the update option, none of the completely new Contacts copied. When I
copied them without the update option, the number of Contacts nearly doubled.
There is no field available to show when a contact was last updated, so I
cannot tell which are changed and which are not.

In the end, I still lost all the internal links among my Contacts. None of
my lists have any links to the Contacts in them at all.

Bottom line: this solution does not work, it was at least as poor my
original solution, and it consumed an egregious amount of time.

All I need to do is get ownership of the 100-odd e-mail messages that
Outlook will not let me delete. Is there no way to assign myself permission
to Delete them?

Humbly submitted.
Thanks.
 
The solution works fine. You didn't use it. It's impossible to tell from
your post just what you did do.
 
Thanks. But it was still a very painful recovery

Russ Valentine said:
The solution works fine. You didn't use it. It's impossible to tell from
your post just what you did do.
--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]
Alcuin said:
Alcuin replies:
Ok. I dropped back 3 months to find an old Outlook.pst that did not have
the fouled messages.

From my current Outlook.pst (the renamed PST file), I updated all the
messages, calendar events, journal entries, and tasks.

However, I have over 2,000 Contacts, and I could not find which were
updated
and which were not. When I copied them from the new folder into the old
one
with the update option, none of the completely new Contacts copied. When
I
copied them without the update option, the number of Contacts nearly
doubled.
There is no field available to show when a contact was last updated, so I
cannot tell which are changed and which are not.

In the end, I still lost all the internal links among my Contacts. None
of
my lists have any links to the Contacts in them at all.

Bottom line: this solution does not work, it was at least as poor my
original solution, and it consumed an egregious amount of time.

All I need to do is get ownership of the 100-odd e-mail messages that
Outlook will not let me delete. Is there no way to assign myself
permission
to Delete them?

Humbly submitted.
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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