Solved Outlook migration to new PC

denvilledon · Mar 10, 2022

Getting a new laptop and I will like to migrate all Outlook Office 2021 data to the new PC. I was hoping someone could either tell me what to do or send a link with the best way to accomplish the move.

idgat · Mar 10, 2022

What/How much do you want to migrate - email, tasks, contacts, etc .. or simply all of the above?

What type of email account - IMAP?

denvilledon · Mar 10, 2022

Would like to move everything... Mail accounts are all POP

Roban · Mar 10, 2022

Find your .pst data files and copy them to a flash drive. You can add the data files on the new PC using Control Panel/Mail.

On your new PC, install Outlook and open it but do not add an email address yet. This will set up Mail (Microsoft Outlook) in Control Panel. Open Mail in Control Panel and under data tab, add your .pst files.

Now, go back to Outlook and add an email address and when it asks to point to a data file, choose the data file for that email address.

note: Your Outlook data files might be located in Documents/Outlook Files or in users/your user name/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Outlook.
You'll have to enable show hidden files if they are located here.

denvilledon · Mar 10, 2022

Do I only have to move the default .pst file? Or all the pst files

idgat · Mar 11, 2022

denvilledon said:
Do I only have to move the default .pst file? Or all the pst files

Depends on what the other .pst files contains ... they may be just the "empty" one created in Outlook when it was first installed, before your account(s) were setup, or they might be archive files containing historical emails. also the possibility that they could be previous emails if there had been a "hiccup" in Outlook and it had to create a new .pst.

you could always just transfer the current one and keep the others as backups - you can always (re) open multiple .pst files from within MS Outlook and view the contents, without importing them into you current email collection.

Note that if your email account was IMAP, these emails would still be on the mail server and you'd never have to worry about backups or transferring them in future changes. Switching to an IMAP account may be worth investigating.

zbook · Mar 11, 2022

There are third party software (cost approximately $60) that indicate that they can move:

Files
Settings
Applications
etc.

If you want to do it for free it likely will take more time.

(so it's time versus cost)

Try3 · Mar 11, 2022

I also use pop email.

1 Install Outlook 2021 on your new computer and open it once, which will involve setting up your email as pop in it. Then close Outlook.
2 Go to this folder to find the newly created outlook.pst file and either zip it up then delete it or just delete it. This can only be done whilst Outlook is closed.

C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook

- You can just paste that whole line into the File explorer addressbar to get straight there

- Apparently, sometimes it is in C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Roaming\Local\Microsoft\Outlook but I have not seen that.

3 Copy your old computer's pst files wherever you want. I keep mine within subfolders of my Documents folder so they get included in my routine backups.
4 Re-open Outlook. It will complain that it cannot find its pst file and then bring up a browsing dialog for you to select your own outlook.pst file. Then it will open it quite happily.
5 You will have to open your other pst files manually using File menu, Open. Once they've been opened once they will be re-opened automatically every time you start Outlook.

6 You will also be able to bring across many of your other Outlook settings - see Locating Outlook data and configuration files - Outlook 2007-2021-365

Best of luck,
Denis

idgat · Mar 11, 2022

Try3 said:
5 You will have to open your other pst files manually using File menu, Open. Once they've been opened once they will be re-opened automatically every time you start Outlook.

But they can be closed by right-click on the header for a particular email account and closing it.

Try3 · Mar 11, 2022

Try3 said:
5 You will have to open your other pst files manually using File menu, Open. Once they've been opened once they will be re-opened automatically every time you start Outlook.

idgat said:
But they can be closed by right-click on the header for a particular email account and closing it.

They can deliberately be closed using the File menu.
They can deliberately be closed using the Outlook Navigation pane in Folder view.
They can probably be deliberately closed using other methods.
I don't know about using a header though. That sounds to me to be an IMAP/EAC thing but I suppose there might be some particular View in which that applies.

All the best,
Denis

denvilledon · Mar 26, 2022

Finished moving to new PC, First thing I did was a backup of old PC
- Checked to see what my default .PST file was
- Exported .PST file
- I then deleted Office from the old PC.
- On new PC went to my Microsoft account and dounloaded and installed Office
- Could not get the license activated. Called Microsoft and they called back in less then 3 minutes I told them what I did and they fixed it took less then 1 minuite ( must have had the right rep)
- Imported the .PST file
- Added all my email accounts
- Made sure all accounts pointed to the same .PST
DONE ALL GOOD