OneDrive and Outlook data files

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ShortyNZ

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#320319 31-Jul-2025 13:15

Hi everyone

I am no expert, but I sometimes help my friend (who is 85, but pretty computer literate) with the odd thing she can’t figure out.

Earlier in the year, she reluctantly told me that she asked someone who was staying with her to “delete OneDrive” for her. The result was that she could no longer find any trace of Outlook, and had been without it for a couple of months. She had access to email via Spark/Xtra webmail, but she had a lot of historic email stored in personal folders on Outlook, so was mainly upset about that.

I managed to fix it easily enough; I found all the Outlook folders (as well as lots of other stuff she hadn’t intended to be deleted) in the Recycle Bin and just restored it all and everything worked fine again.

Recently, she asked me about (again) deleting OneDrive, as, although I had changed her settings to not default-save to OneDrive and to not backup to OneDrive, her documents still seemed to be going there. She kept getting pop-ups asking her whether she wanted to share these files, which bothered her, as she didn’t really want anything in the cloud. (I haven’t seen the pop-ups, so am not sure where they originate).

So my answer to this (rightly or wrongly) was to move her files and folders from OneDrive to C: or D: drives (she has an HP desktop PC like mine, which have a much bigger D: drive than C:), in the first instance.

Imagine my horror when I found this had created the same situation as before, and Outlook was then nowhere to be found/couldn't be opened.

Her Outlook data file had obviously been on OneDrive and I had moved it to C:, so I then copied that file back to OneDrive.

Her Outlook was restored intact (phew) BUT her send/receive function now returns an error message of: “(0X8004010F): Outlook data file cannot be accessed”.

My Google searches seem to indicate that I should create a new profile for her, but I’m too scared to in case it messes with her saved historic email folders.

I will pay someone to fix it remotely online if I need to soon, but I thought I might try here first. I am not super technically competent (probably obvious😉) so plain-ish language would be helpful 😉 I know this reads like a comedy of errors, and I'll just have to suck that up 😉

She lives a 15 minute drive away, so I’m afraid I don’t have the ability to give info off her PC on the spot, so to speak. She is on Windows 11.

Many thanks.

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xpd

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#3398724 31-Jul-2025 14:44

This is what I'd do... others may have different methods

If emails she wants to keep are currently showing in Outlook, best thing to do, is export the current mailbox to a PST (File -> Open & Export).

Save this to the C drive somewhere (C:\Backup\(filename.pst) other than the Documents / One Drive folders. Any emails in Outlook, are now backed up to a file no longer attached to Outlook.

If she does not use/need OneDrive, uninstall it.

Then go into Control Panel and go into Mail. Remove all profiles.

Then add a fresh one. Once added, it will download any mail on their server (Spark).

Then you can import or open the PST holding the "old" mail structure, and manipulate the emails as you want - move to the "new" Inbox or just keep as a separate PST.

Moving them to the "new" Inbox is probably the better option if she does not have any backup system, as then at least theyre all held on Sparks server.

One system I do recommend to users who are not confident with PC's but want a backup system, is Backblaze. Its around $80 a year, and you install an agent on the PC, and it sits there backing up almost the entire PC all the time, so if anything is lost, you have a decent time window to get into Backblaze to recover it. But note, this is not per email, but per file - so if an email was deleted that was needed, you'd need to download the PST/OST file from Backblaze and attach it to Outlook as a folder to pull out the deleted emails.

XPD / Gavin

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ShortyNZ

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#3418541 24-Sep-2025 17:02

I just wanted to come back with an update on what happened, by way of thanking you for your answers.

In the end, I DID use a paid techy person to help me, as I ended up feeling out of my depth.

He was very good and I think the best description of what he did was what xpd had outlined - he created a fresh profile, backed it up to her Spark web account, then sucked it all back from there into her fresh profile.

I possibly could have done this myself to that point, but to make it actually send/receive again, he had to mess around a fair bit with her POP3 settngs and I think port settings (which I can't seem to find now in order to describe it better).

He also completely removed OneDrive.

Thanks for all your help, which was helpful and quite educational for me 😉 It also meant that when he was remotely fixing it all for me, I could more or less follow/understand what he was doing.