Where are my contacts?

[rdjohn]

My laptop bricked itself just before Christmas. I took it to a repairer who said the drive was completely wiped, so he just reloaded Windows 10. I spent about 6-hours reloading stuff and the Wireless adapter failed again. So I have a Win11 machine arriving tomorrow.

When I loaded Outlook, 12-years worth of emails tumbled from Gmail. The odd thing is that the contacts did not arrive. Prior to starting Outlook 365 my emails and contacts were in a .pst file on the drive. I just assumed that they had all been converted somehow, but seemingly not.

Has anyone a suggestion as to how I might recover them, especially where they could be located?

TIA

[skyebear]

Any chance they're saved in your Gmail account?

[grumbledoak]

You could try https://contacts.google.com/

[rdjohn]

grumbledoak said:

You could try https://contacts.google.com/

Thanks, when I do that I can see the contacts on my Android phone, nothing mote than perhaps 5-years old.

The very old stuff, was on a ..pst file before 365 came along and messed things up. They did show in my Outlook account, presumable a Microsoft account.

[xeny]

Presumably the contacts were in the pst file that was lost when the drive crashed?

[grumbledoak]

rdjohn said:

Thanks, when I do that I can see the contacts on my Android phone, nothing mote than perhaps 5-years old.

The very old stuff, was on a ..pst file before 365 came along and messed things up. They did show in my Outlook account, presumable a Microsoft account.

I think the Outlook equivalent now is https://outlook.live.com/people
It may have sync'd them.

[rdjohn]

Thanks, but they are not there either. That is completely empty.

[Sheepshanks]

rdjohn said:

When I loaded Outlook, 12-years worth of emails tumbled from Gmail. The odd thing is that the contacts did not arrive. Prior to starting Outlook 365 my emails and contacts were in a .pst file on the drive. I just assumed that they had all been converted somehow, but seemingly not.

Outlook just works from the pst file, unless you move everything to online (the ost file). We had someone senior at work do this - we keep backups of what’s on the server, but he was filing all his online stuff to a pst, so it wasn’t there to backup. Then his drive failed.

[rdjohn]

Sheepshanks said:

Outlook just works from the pst file, unless you move everything to online (the ost file). We had someone senior at work do this - we keep backups of what’s on the server, but he was filing all his online stuff to a pst, so it wasn’t there to backup. Then his drive failed.

Sounds a bit like me, only without the IT support

[bitchstewie]

Is your email address a Gmail one?

[rdjohn]

Yes, I use two email addresses, both gmail. When I was using Outlook 20-years ago I was living in France and used a Wanadoo email account. When I left France in 2022, I stopped using my Orange.fr SIM card and so lost control of the account as I had no two-step authorisation.

I mainly use an iPad for basic stuff and it has most of my contacts, but not all. Checking last night, I am half expecting that when I load iCloud on to my new laptop and sync it, I might get my contacts back.

In my head, Windows was the master and the iPad its slave, but in Apple World, it needs to control everything.

I am still at a loss that they did not reside somewhere on my Gmail account.

[bitchstewie]

Have a look in iCloud.com and see what's there.

[rdjohn]

Yes, they are all there, except the few important ones with password hints etc that I really needed to use to set up the laptop. No idea why they were not in Outlook where they used to be.

Anyway, the new on has arrived and is currently being set up.

Thanks to everyone for their help, happy new year!

[bitchstewie]

Unless you need something that Outlook does, personally, I'd stick with using the web interface for Gmail.

It makes it much easier to avoid scenarios like this as your stuff just stays in Gmail and there's nothing to transfer.

[rdjohn]

Yes, they are all there, except the few important ones with password hints etc that I really needed to use to set up the laptop. No idea why they were not in Outlook where they used to be.

Anyway, the new on has arrived and is currently being set up.

Thanks to everyone for their help, happy new year!

[rdjohn]

NOTE TO MODS

This was an issue wholly related to my digital contacts in MS Outlook - absolutely nothing to do with business and everything to do with computers.