Outlook 2003 Help Needed -Overwritten Contacts

[iGen3]

Hello, this is my first post so thanks for any help you can provide. At work, I had about 350 Contacts in Outlook 2003. A coworker tried to sync his blackberry with the contacts and instead of taking them from the computer, he did the opposite, he managed to take the 15 contacts from his blackberry and put them into Outlook. So now I have 15 contacts and need to recover the original 350. Is there a way to do this or am I SOL? I thought about trying to find a PAB and import it, but I don't know the location on the hard drive? Should I do a search some way? Have I overwritten the contacts and screwed?

[caperjack]

Hello, this is my first post so thanks for any help you can provide. At work, I had about 350 Contacts in Outlook 2003. A coworker tried to sync his blackberry with the contacts and instead of taking them from the computer, he did the opposite, he managed to take the 15 contacts from his blackberry and put them into Outlook. So now I have 15 contacts and need to recover the original 350. Is there a way to do this or am I SOL? I thought about trying to find a PAB and import it, but I don't know the location on the hard drive? Should I do a search some way? Have I overwritten the contacts and screwed?

2yrs ago I worked at a call center tech support ,For Franklin Covey Planning software ,and it used Outllook and Palm desktop and hot sinc to transfer from the palm to the computer and we always had to make sure were the most upto date Data was ,on the HDrive of the palm ,because if we helped the customer over right it the wrong way we were screwed !Some people had up to 5 yrs of data on there palm and or computer, So I think yous in goneee and replaced with his.
With 350 contacts you really should have had a back up!!
if you did and its lost on the hddrive do a search for *.WAB

[DMR]

With 350 contacts you really should have had a back up!!

Ouch, yes: Chapter 3, in which Pooh learns the lessons of making frequent backups! :mrgreen:

Are you using Outlook in conjunction with an Exchange server, or is it just one of the "stand-alone" implementations of Outlook?

You may be able to recover/re-import some (if not all) of the overwritten contact information if you had an existing Personal Address Book (.pab) file which contained the same info as your Outlook Contacts folder living somewhere on your local hard drive or a network drive. First, open Windows Explorer and search your local hard drive(s) for all filesnamed .pab

[DMR]

if you did and its lost on the hddrive do a search for *.WAB

Possibly, but that would be more likely with Outlook Express, as OE uses the Windows Address Book (.wab) directly. Outlook does not, so things could be a be a bit more difficult in this case.