This weekend I began the long process of preparing my main home system for the warp jump to Vista Ultimate Edition. Blank DVDs lay scattered about and lists of files sit in various notepad windows on the taskbar. Long searches for mysterious artifacts have resulted in some cries of “Really.. I didn’t erase that?” along with the mutterings of “Well it doesn’t matter.. it will all go when the Great Format comes.”. But what really hit me like a brick is that I will be getting more removable storage drives in the future because mass migrating large numbers of files on 160 GB drives, or larger, just plain sucks if you decide that you want a library of burned data discs. Offsite storage is a goal I try to complete once a year, however, I think I will just say “no” when I go to the 500 GB drives for $100 that await us in the near future.

What I did learn, and the reason why I am posting this, is that adding Windows Desktop Search to emulate the new search in Vista doesn’t work very well. I was looking for my .PST files from Outlook. I knew where they were, I knew the path and I went there in Explorer windows to find nothing. All my view settings are set to show everything. Compressed NTFS files, system files you know the lot. Each time I searched via the new Windows App I got zero hits. Using the old default, called Search Companion, turned up not an electronic sausage either.

What I had to resort to is to open Outlook, do an ALT + F, go down to “Data File Management” and open the “Outlook.pst” and “archive.pst” files from there. I couldn’t see them any other way. Hopefully this is just one of those “joys of beta testing” woes I have gone on about in the last few weeks. However if it isn’t and you are running Outlook 2007 Beta or RTM you may want to keep a look out for this..

If you want to see if you can find your Outlook 2007 files here’s the default path in Windows XP.

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner or Your Profile Name\Local Settings/Application Data\Microsoft/Outlook

You are looking for any files that end with a .pst. if you don’t see them then use the steps I listed above. You can also import and export Outlook files but that can get rather messy if you are using various versions of Office/Outlook on several machines.