You need to do a little investigative work to find the right one. This means you may find systems where the profile is named “Exchange”, and there are NK2 files named Exchange.NK2, Exchange-2.NK2, and Exchange-3.NK2. Outlook handles this by adding a number to the end. If there have been multiple profiles in the past with the same name then a new NK2 file will be created each time. A New profile will not have a corresponding NK2 file until you have opened Outlook once and typed out an email address at least once for the current profile. Please make sure you backup all of your NK2 files before making any changes. Keep in mind that this procedure is mildly complicated and it is easy to make a mistake. Now when you launch Outlook it will use the restored autocomplete data when typing out email addresses. Delete Outlook.NK2, and copy in Exchange.NK2 and rename it Outlook.NK2. If we drill down to the users current NK2 folder we find an Outlook.NK2. We determine the name of the current profile on the new machine. It contains all of our autocomplete data. Now we have Exchange.NK2 from the old computer. We find Exchange.nk2, copy it over to this machine. The old machine has an Outlook profile named Exchange. So lets imagine we are moving to a new machine. The trick to the restore is to make sure Outlook is closed, copy over the old NK2 file, and replace the current NK2 with the one with all of the data in it. If we open up our outlook profiles in the control panel we can see that they match up to their respective names: So we can see in the above folder listing that there are a few files in this folder. The name of the file matches the outlook profile name. The file is placed in the users profile folder under “Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook”, and always has the extension. After running the filemon utility from Sysinternals I discovered that outlook stores this data in a single file This happened so much that I needed to find an way to backup and restore this data. When I sit down with the user to see what they mean…it is simply the auto-complete that is no longer working for them. This is after I have painstakingly exported all of the old address books and moved them over properly.
Restoring outlook identity from time machine upgrade#
It is surprising the number of times I have completed an upgrade of a network and suddenly get calls that all of the address books are missing. Why is this bad? Because a large number of users consider their auto complete an official address book. Unfortuantely these addresses are not saved on the server – even when you are only using exchange as your primary email source. For example, when I am about to type out an address in the “To” field of an email it will show me a list of matches as I type: If you don’t know what I mean by “Auto complete” it is the feature in Outlook that finishes what you are typing.