Microsoft Outlook PST Backup to Network

For home users, backing up your Microsoft PST (personal folders) is not an issue. Backing up Outlook for a home user was covered in this blog: Outlook Data Backups

What people may not have read, at the bottom, and it may not have been clear enough is there is a solution for those users who are on a network.

I'll make it simple and to the point:



Microsoft has never supported the use of a PST from a networked drive, and with good reason.

Outlook requires constant read/write access to the PST. The slightest interruption will cause corruption or issues with Outlook.

What you're doing is not supported.

What I've done for my users is written a very simple script that they can execute when they close Outlook that copies their PST file(s) to their personal drive on the network:

COPY %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook\*.pst u:data\outlook /y 

NOTE: This batch file backs up the PST to the user's U drive, which is clearly written. It can be any drive/folder you wish, you just have to change what I have written: u:data/outlook. The rest of the batch file stays the same, including the /y at the end. If your user does this at least weekly, they should suffer little in the way of major data loss in the event of corruption, hard drive crash, etc. 

Save the script as a batch file on the C drive. Make a shortcut. Change the icon to the MSN butterfly. Rename it to OUTLOOK BACKUP. My users love this. 

If you don't have a policy set against the use of the Windows Scheduler, you can implement that to automatically back up the PST file to the desired location on the network.  

Good luck! As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.