Saving Graces

By Jerry Pournelle

July 4, 2005

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Column 299 (Continued from the Previous Week)

The Outlook Gotcha

There are times when I believe the Microsoft Outlook design team contains at least one sadist whose goal in life is to see just how far he can push users before they give up the program in sheer frustration. I like Outlook, and it's one reason I use Windows rather than a Mac; but it may yet be what pushes me to the Mac.

Outlook notoriously keeps all its information in one enormous unparsable file called outlook.pst. There are many ways to back up that file, but only when Outlook is not running. When Outlook is running this file is open, and it can't be backed up by any program I have tried, and I've tried a lot of them. Many claim to be able to do so. One publisher tells me of his thousands of happy customers. All I know is that it won't work for me: When it runs, I get error messages about delayed write failures, and the file isn't backed up.

Bob Thompson points out that I have one option: I can store outlook.pst in a directory on my Xandros Linux box. Linux can copy open files. Of course if it's being written to while it's being copied very bad things can happen, so this is an experiment I think I'll pass up; far too much of my life is tied up in that outlook.pst file.

Outlook contains a backup feature for that .pst file, but it only runs when you shut Outlook down: Then up pops a box that asks if you want to back it up. Unfortunately, you may be shutting the program down because you have to restart your machine, and since the outlook.pst file is huge and takes several minutes to copy even on a 1 Gigabit network, you probably won't want to make the backup copy just then.

The program Outback Plus will make backups of all the critical Outlook files, but woe to you if you try to run it while Outlook is running: First it fails to make the backups, then it shuts Outlook down for you. I don't know what it does after that. I used the old Outback (the version before Outback Plus) and recommended it, but they have improved it beyond my needs.

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