A: Microsoft Office introduced both Outlook and the wonderful concept of My Documents, a single location for your data files, making them easier to back up and protect. Then Microsoft messed the whole thing up by not putting your Outlook data in My Documents. Outlook keeps your contacts, appointments, and e-mail in a file that's most likely called outlook.pst. What exactly it's called and where you can find it will depend on what version of Outlook you're using, what versions you've used in the past, whether you've ever used Microsoft Exchange, and whether you share or have shared your computer.

No matter where the Outlook data is stored, the files you want will have the extension .pst, so you can find them by searching your hard drive. Select Start-Find-Files or Folders. For the Named field, enter *.pst. For 'Look in', select Local hard drives. Click Find Now.

Backing up data is no good unless you can restore it, and restoring a .pst file is tricky. After reinstalling Outlook, search for a .pst file as described in the previous paragraph. When you find it, copy the old .pst file from the backup over the new one on your hard drive, changing the name if necessary. Then launch Outlook. If you get a wordy message box starting with "The location messages are delivered to...", click Yes. You'll find your old information ready to be used again.

If you use Outlook 2000, you may also want to save configuration info like mail rules and toolbar settings. For that, back up the files in your C:\Windows\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder.