How to Backup Outlook Address Book Easily and Effectively

What is Outlook Address Book?

Outlook Address Book is a collection of address books or address lists created from your contact folders. This address book combines all folders of your Outlook contacts. However, the Outlook address book is not a physical address book, but a virtual address book, only shown to your contacts folder, instead of storing the Outlook address book as a separate file from your data storage.

To simplify working with the Contacts folder in your mailbox, Outlook uses a Personal Address Book. Your Personal Address Book (PAB) may contain contact information and email addresses that are not in your Outlook address book. The Personal Address Book (PAB) creates a separate file on your computer's hard drive, but it is recommended to check that the address book is backed up in case of data loss.

Identify the Personal Address Book File Used by Your E-mail Profile

After understanding what an Outlook address book is, you can follow the steps below to identify the PAB file used by your mail archive.

Step 1. Launch MS Outlook.

Step 2. Click E-Mail Accounts under the Tools menu.

Step 3. Now, click View or change existing directories or address books under Directory and hit Next.

Step 4. Copy or note path of PAB file as mentioned in the Path box.

For example: C:\Exchange\Mailbox.pab – this simply indicates that your file name mailbox.pab is stored in the Exchange folder on your C drive.

Step 5. Click OK and hit the Finish button.

Note:

You will need the path information as mentioned in Step 4 to find the PAB file to use it as backup or copy or transfer contacts to another computer.

How to Backup Outlook Address Book in Contact Folder

As mentioned above, you need to back up your Outlook address book to avoid delete address book by mistake. Therefore, choosing a safe and reliable Outlook backup software can help you improve your efficiency. For example, AOMEI Backupper Professional is a good choice. As a professional backup software, it provides you with the Outlook backup function, which can back up any the Outlook address book. In addition to emails, you can also back up address books, attachments, calendars, contacts, etc. on Outlook. It also has the following advantages.

• You can backup Outlook address book to different paths, such as internal and external disks, USB drives, NAS devices, network locations, SD cards, cloud services, etc.
• You can create a Scheduled backup for Outlook address book according to your needs. It allows you to set Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Event-triggered to perform scheduled backup tasks.
• It supports various Windows PC operating systems, including Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, and Vista.

You can download and install this professional backup software, and then start backing up Outlook according to the graphic tutorial below. If you are a Windows Server user, you can choose the AOMEI Backupper Server version.

Step 1. Open Outlook, and be sure you log in with the account containing messages you want to backup.

Step 2. Launch AOMEI Backupper Professional and click Backup > Outlook Backup.

Step 3. Click Add Outlook data and select Contacts containing the Outlook address book. Then click OK.

Step 4. Click the second box to select a local path, network or NAS location, or cloud drive to store your Outlook address book.

Step 5. Enable Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Event triggers to schedule backup and click Start Backup to backup Outlook address book automatically.

Note:

Backup Scheme:  You can enable automatic backup cleanup methods in Backup Scheme to solve the backup disk full issue. It can delete older backup images regularly.

Summary

This article introduces what is Outlook Address Book, how to identify the PAB file used by your email archives, and how to use a safe and reliable Outlook backup software - AOMEI Backupper to back up Outlook Address Book data to avoid data loss.If you keep all your contacts in the Contacts folder and your preference is to back up only your contacts, you can create a separate "Backup Contacts" PST file.

It provides you with the Outlook backup function, which can back up any data you want to back up. In addition to emails, you can also back up attachments, calendars, contacts, etc. on Outlook. You can download this software to explore more.