Recently I purchased a new computer running Windows 7. On my old computer I used the inbuilt Window XP backup utility to make a backup of my data into .bkf files. However, Windows 7 does not recognise these files so I found a utility within Windows 7 called NTBackup which is able to open the files. This program does seem to work but I cannot recover my Outlook files. The program skips these files during the recovery and says “Warning: Unable to create “C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook - skipped. Reason: Access is denied”. Can you help with recovering these files?

Windows itself cannot open .bkf files through the normal Windows Explorer or file system view (like a folder or ZIP file) because these are special backup files which require a supporting program to open and extract data from the files. The Windows XP backup utility to which you refer is actually very similar to the NTBackup utility, and you are quite correct that you do need to use the NTBackup program to restore the .bkf files in Windows Vista or Windows 7. For the most part, restoring from backup should be a relatively straight-forward process, as the .bkf file retains a reference to the original location of the backed-up files and can restore the files to that location on the new computer. However, when restoring email files (particularly, Microsoft Outlook data files) the process becomes more complicated. This is because the Outlook installation on your computer keeps its own references and indexes to the data files that should be used, so simply restoring the backed-up data files over the top of the existing data files on the computer will generally cause Outlook to complain and not open the files (or, in some cases, Outlook itself will refuse to open as it cannot access the main data file). Therefore, even if you were able to copy the data files back into the Outlook data store directory (if you were not getting the access denied message) you would likely encounter a whole heap of trouble. So, we need an alternative method to recover the files back into Outlook.

The recommended method is by importing the backed-up file into Outlook. As the first step, we need to recover your Outlook data file to a different location (so that we can actually get a copy of the file without encountering the access denied message). The actual file which we need is the .PST file, as that contains all of your Outlook data (such as emails, calendar entries, etc.). Using the NTBackup utility, open your .bkf file and then restore the .PST file (which should have been located in the same Outlook data store directory on your old computer - C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook). However, you need to restore this file to a different location. For convenience, I suggest that you recover the file to the Windows desktop so that it is easily accessible.

Once the .PST file has been recovered we can commence importing it into Outlook. Open Outlook and if you have already configured Outlook you should be presented with a blank inbox and empty structure of default folders (e.g. Inbox, Sent Items, etc). If you have not already setup Outlook then you will be presented with the first-run wizard allowing you to configure your email accounts, etc. Should this appear, go ahead and setup all of your accounts and so forth. In either case, you will eventually be presented with the main Outlook window ready for you to go about your business. Go to the “File” menu > “Import and Export”. The Import and Export wizard window will appear. Select “Import from another program or file” and click “Next”. The wizard will now prompt for the file type that you wish to import. Select “Personal Folder File (.pst)” and click “Next”. You will now need to select the location of the PST file that you wish to import. If you followed the previous advice, then you would have recovered the PST file to your Windows desktop for ease of access. Once you have selected the file you need to instruct Outlook how it should deal with duplicate items. This is in case there are already items in Outlook which are the same as those in the backup (for whatever reason). From your description of the situation this should not occur, but for consistency I would select “Replace duplicate with items imported” to ensure that all items are definitely imported from the backup copy. Finally, click “Next” to finish the wizard and then complete the importing process. Once this has finished all the information from your backed-up Outlook data file should be imported into the data file on your new computer.

This method also has another major advantage over simply replacing the Outlook data file on your new computer with the data file from the backup. In the event that you already setup and have been using Outlook on the new computer, before transferring the Outlook data from the backup across to the computer, there is a good chance that the Outlook data file on the new computer contains items that you wish to keep (e.g. emails, calendar entries, etc.). Simply copying the backed-up data file over the top of that existing data file will lose all data within the existing file, since the entire data file has been replaced with the backup copy. In contrast, using the method described in this article where you are importing the data from your backup data file into the existing data file, the backed-up information is simply being added to the already existing information in the data file on the new computer. As such, you would not lose any information.