How to Recover Old Outlook Appointments

by Brian Hooper

Microsoft Outlook automatically archives your data on a routine basis using its AutoArchive feature. Archived data is saved in an archive.pst folder. The benefit is that recovering old calendar appointments is a matter of opening up the folder and searching for the files you need. Even if you thought you deleted an appointment, and checked the Deleted Items folder only to find nothing in it, there’s a good chance it’s still recoverable. Outlook supports restoring deleted files provided your organization uses Microsoft Exchange Server, which many small- to medium-size businesses rely on as their messaging server.

Deleted Appointments

1. Open Outlook. Click the “Folder” tab.

2. Select “Recover Deleted Items” from the “Clean Up” group.

3. Click the item you want to recover from the Recover Deleted Items dialog box, and then click the Recover Selected Items button. Choose multiple files by pressing and holding the “Shift” key and selecting several contiguous files. Or press and hold the “Ctrl” key and select multiple files that are not next to one another. Outlook will restore the selected items to the Deleted Items folder. You can then move them to a more suitable folder such as the inbox.

Archived Appointments

1. Click the “File” tab, then “Open.”

2. Click “Open Outlook Data File,” then navigate to the archive Outlook Data File (.pst), which should be under drive:\Users\user\Documents\Outlook Files\archive.pst. Then click “OK.”

3. Click “Archives” from the Folder List on the Navigation Pane, then click the plus sign next to Archives to expand the folder.

4. Navigate to the subfolder containing the file you are looking for; you’ll see the contents of it in the right pane. To move the selected file to another folder, drag the file and drop it into a new folder.

Note: Information in this article applies to Outlook 2010. It may differ slightly or significantly with other products.