Hi Brian,
This is not the best place to ask, because it's a newsgroup for
Microsoft Access the database program rather than for access to external
data generally.
Usually Outlook keeps its data in a .pst or .ost file. If it's an
ordinary installation of Outlook (as opposed to a corporate one) it will
be a .pst "personal folders" file, quite likely called by your username.
After restoring this to the hard drive it's possible either to use
Outlook to open it and access the data it contains (inbox, contacts
etc.) - or to get Outlook to use this instead of of the new .pst file it
created. The exact steps for doing this vary with the version of Outlook
you're using, but should be somewhere in Help (e.g. try searching for
"about data files").