Well, now that we’ve got our important data moved to a new partition in case of any OS crashes, re-installations or upgrades, let’s take a look at Microsoft Outlook. Some of us, for various reasons, haven’t switched to a webmail-only experience for e-mail, and Outlook, for all its criticisms, continues to be a popular application for email and appointment management.

So, how can we do for Outlook what we did for the rest of our personal files in the article linked above? The answer is obvious; store Outlook’s data files on a separate partition as well. Here’s how it’s done.

First, export your data.

It’s always wise to create a backup when working with important information. Outlook makes it easy:

Simply click on your “File” menu and choose “Import and Export.” Follow the steps in the images below to create a PST file that Outlook will be able to import in the future, if need be.

Be sure to select “Personal Folders” here. This will include your Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc. along with any other folders you may have created in Outlook.

Now, choose a location and filename and you’re set:

That’s it. Now a backup of all of Outlook’s Data exists. If you’ve created a set of rules for managing or filtering your email, you can export that, too. Simply click on the “Tools” menu and select “Rules and Alerts.” There’s an options button there that will allow you to import or export your Outlook Rules. I suggest saving the file to the same directory as the data folder exported in the steps above.

Great! Now we’ve backed up all of the important information minus the email account information, but that should be handled automatically in the steps on the next page (to be safe, I would recommend recording that information somewhere as there is unfortunately no export feature for this).

Configure Outlook to use the backed-up data file.

Now that we’ve got a backup copy of our Outlook data, it’s time to tell Outlook to use this new file instead of the one on the system partition that it uses by default.

Go to your Tools menu and choose “Account Settings.”

Click on the “Data Files” tab:

As you can see above, the default (highlighted) data file resides on the C drive. I have already clicked the4 “Add” button to add my own, previously exported, data files and set the Outlook.pst file as the default. Straightforward.

All that’s left to do is to delete the original Outlook.pst file. Rules, accounts and all other data will be copied over and instructed to download data into the new file (you will get a dialog box telling you this when you try to delete the original default file from the list).

That’s all there is to it. Outlook data now resides on a non-system partition for easy access for dual-booters and frequesnt reinstallers as well as anyone that upgrades their OS or has a problem requiring a Windows reinstall.