Zed3, there’s an even better fix available – moving your Address Book and your emails to your ‘My Documents’ folder, (from where you can easily make backups to another partition or hard drive).
(These instructions are for Win 2000, but Win 98 and XP would be very similar.)
Firstly, the easy one – moving your email folder: create a new directory within your ‘My Documents’ folder. (I call mine ‘OE Express’.) Within that directory, make two sub directories, ‘Messages’ and ‘Addresses’.
Now open Outlook Express and go Tools/Options/Maintenance/Store Folder. This will show you the current location of your existing email messages. (Using Windows Explorer, you can copy them and move them to your new ‘Messages’ folder.) Now click ‘Change’ and find your way to the newly created ‘Messages’ folder. Click ‘OK’.
(Write down the exact path to your new storage folder, as you’ll need it again for moving the address book in Step Two – [see below].)
If you use multiple identities within WinXP, this will only apply to your identity, so you’ll have to repeat the process for each identity if you use more than one on your computer.
Now to your original problem.
Moving your address book is a little more involved, but not too daunting. As fobtsco says, your OE address book is a .WAB file, usually buried so deeply it’s nearly impossible to backup easily.
Firstly, close Outlook Express, any open windows and your Address Book and then locate your WAB file. It’s usually in C:\Documents and Settings\(your identity)\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book.)
There are two files making up your Address Book. Copy and paste them both into the ‘Addresses’ folder you created in your ‘My Documents’ folder.
Click Start/Run, type ‘regedit’, /OK. Double click your way down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Microsoft / WAV / WAB4 / WAB File Name (these last steps can vary slightly depending on your setup).
From the Registry menu, select ‘Export Registry File’ and save the selected branch to your desktop as OldWAB.reg. (This will allow you to restore it should something go wrong.)
In the right hand pane, double click Default and enter the new path of your WAB as noted above, but make the final step ‘Addresses’ rather than ‘Messages’. The final entry in the chain will be the name of your original WAB file with a .wab extension.
Close the Registry Editor.
I found it was good to then open Outlook Express and make an amendment to my Address Book, then go to My Documents and check that the change is reflected in the Address Book, as the system won’t tell you if you’ve been unsuccessful in creating the new path absolutely correctly. If the amendment appears, you’ve done it correctly.
Your emails and Address Book will now be stored in your ‘My Documents’ folder and you very easily make backups, every day if you like. To do so, I’d highly recommend ‘File Synch’(
http://www.fileware.com ).
(My thanks to ‘PC User’, Aug 2001 edition, for both these excellent tricks.)
Now, if there’s someone out there who could show me how to do exactly the same in the full Outlook, I’d appreciate instructions.