I recently allowed OneDrive to back up my documents to the Cloud.
After the uploading had finished to the Cloud, I got an error when I tried to open and download my emails using the Outlook mail client.
The error was “Outlook .PST cannot be opened”
For some strange reason, MS chooses to create the “Outlook Files” folder in the Documents folder, instead of the root of the drive.
OneDrive does not back up the root of the drive it only backs up your Documents; your photos and your desktop.
I saw that the path to my .PST file was now in OneDrive. Microsoft does not recommend putting your .PST file in the Cloud
So as part of the synching process, OneDrive locks the .PST so that the Outlook programme can’t access the .PST file.
The only way to resolve this is to move the PST file from the Cloud back onto your computer but not in the Documents folder.
Firstly close Outlook.
As a back up, use a USB stick to back up the Outlook Files folder in case something goes wrong during the next steps.
Once you have backed up your Outlook Files folder, then I suggest that you simply move the Outlook Files folder to the root (C:) of your drive from the My Documents folder.
After you do that and you open Outlook, you will get an error that Outlook can’t find your .PST.
Point Outlook to the .PST in the Outlook Files folder on your drive root that you just moved.
Now your Outlook will be able to access your mail file however you will notice that you now have a send/receive error!
To fix this you need to close Outlook and type “Control Panel” in the search pane at the bottom left of your screen to access your Outlook email setting via the “User Accounts” link in Control Panel.
Click the Mail (Microsoft Outlook) link at the bottom of the list.
Click the Email Accounts button.
Once in your email settings, click the “Change Folder” on the bottom left corner and add a new folder such as test. So new mails we be moved from to this test folder. Don’t worry this is only temporary.
Click this test folder in the list and then click ok to close the email account settings window.
Now open Outlook and your emails will start downloading to this new test folder.
Lastly, in Outlook, move any emails that have gone to this test folder back to your inbox and then close Outlook and again go back into the email account settings and change the download email location back to the inbox.
You can’t delete the Test folder from the email accounts window. You must do it from within Outlook itself. You can right click the Test folder and select to “Delete Folder”
Finally open Outlook and it should be working correctly.
One thing that I noticed is that any Outlook mail forwarding rules that you have previously set up, have been removed so you’ll need to create the rules again to direct the mail into the appropriate folders.
Please note that you must manually back up your .PST file every so often as it will not be protected.
