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Summary: Outlook's PST or Personal STore is a single file that holds your email, contacts and more. You can use Outlook itself to find the location of the file.
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PST stands for "Personal STore" - as in your personal mail storage. PST files are really fairly complex databases that contain your mail, your calendar, your contacts and even more, when you use Microsoft Office's Outlook mail program.
The default location has changed a time or two over the years, but mostly because the default location of many things changed between Windows 9x and Windows NT/XP and later. And of course there's always a chance that your PST is stored in some other, non-default, location.
Rather than telling you where the default location is, let's use Outlook itself to tell you the exact path of your PST file.
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I'm using Outlook 2003, but the technique is similar for Outlook XP and Outlook 2000.
The easiest and quickest way I know of is to open the "tree view" of your folders, if you haven't already:
Each top level item, normally called "Personal Folders", or "Outlook Today", represents a separate PST. Right click on it and then select Properties:
Now click on the Advanced button:
And there, right in the middle of everything, is the Filename and the full path to the PST. In this case you'll notice that I'm most definitely using a non-standard location. Yours will most assuredly be different. The default location under Windows XP is typically a location underneath "\Documents And Settings\username", where "username" is your Windows login account name.
Article C2536 - January 29, 2006
Hi Leo,
Posted by: Carl Michael Scullin at June 21, 2010 12:27 PMIn Outlook 2007, the Advanced button in the Properties dialog gives a different dialog from the one shown on http://ask-leo.com/where_is_my_outlook_pst_file_located.html
In fact, the top level folder is called Mailbox - and what appears in the location is .
Your how-to needs updating.
Mike
i see where the pst file is by following the instruction above, but when i go to that location i can't see it. i have already told the computer to show me the hidden files. What else am i missing??
Posted by: Jason at July 16, 2010 11:56 AMA freind of mine moved his Outlook PST file to his external hard drive and now cannot open the file is there anyway of moving it back to outlook, I have tried drag and drop that does not work and I have tried import, Hlep Please
Posted by: Freddy Crabbe at July 28, 2010 2:05 AMHi Leo,
Posted by: Josh Hershfield at August 22, 2010 9:42 AMI cannot open outlook all of a sudden because of a pst warning that comes up, it has gone awol and neither myself nor my computer consultant can find it on this computer, how do we "get a new one" or find/repair the old one so I can get back into outlook?
thx!
I have problem of first email is stuck so cannot open or delete the file and thus cannot open outlook. I want to use scandisk to repair but cannot find the pst file. Tried all combination
Posted by: CK Bajpai at August 25, 2010 12:33 AM