Resolved Recovered from Win 10 Crash ... Outlook has OST vs. PST issues

Hi.

My wife's Windows 10 system failed miserably and, after trying all the gentle approaches, like System Restore - I could only get the Blue Screen of Resolutions - I ended up doing Rebuild the System, saving all personally created files.

This is a wonderful thing that Microsoft shoulda done many years ago, giving us a way to recover our systems without having to reformat, or wipe out and start fresh, and all the stuff I learned back in the 80s and 90s; but ... and there always is a but ... I chose to restore Windows while leaving personally created documents, etc., alone, safe and secure. I'd done that before on my own machine, a much newer one running the prerelease Insider Preview stuff, and had no problems at all.

So all seemed to be well; I then reinstalled Office Pro 2010. But when I tried to bring in her old Outlook files, I was unable to find them, so to speak. I did, however, find an *.OST file in \Windows.old under \Users. It was the right name for her file, but the wrong extension, as Outlook doesn't seem to like OST files.

I am getting too old to remember all the neat tricks we used way back when, and was hoping that someone here could help me. If it's a simple import of a sort ... or something else sorta easy, I will feel properly foolish and embarrassed, but I need to get her files back. We've bought her a new PC and I want to fix this problem before migrating necessary things to the new PC.

Can you offer some advice on how to do this?

Thank you very much, everybody.

Cheers,
-a.

 

Hi Alex, I don't use Outlook but I think your info should be held on MS cloud storage? I use Gmail and TB and all my emails are on Gmail storage. Someone with more knowledge on the subject will no doubt be able to help you better.

 

Many thanks for all suggestions.

So, while reviewing them, something jumped out at me: Outlook Connector. I located an EXE in my downloads and tried to use it but needed a 64-bit version.

I got that done, restarted her PC, brought up Outlook and was asked if I wanted to connect to a Hotmail account.

Gave the necessary info, restarted again, and it all came back.

I guess I'm not over the hill yet☺ after all.

Once again I thank you all for your help and only hope I can return the favor some time.

-a.