Backup / Restore Auto Complete names in Outlook

Mostly all outlook users are habitual to convenience of outlook's autocomplete feature which  is autocompleting recipient names as you begin to type them and we mostly never add those addresses permanently in address book .

But sometimes we may need to move to another computer or we may need to format our windows operating system for some reason. In such cases, we normally copy/backup only  PST files and Address books, but neither PST file nor address book file keeps a copy of email addresses which you unknowingly stored in outlook's autocomplete cache.

Here is how to backup/restore Auto Complete names in outlook.

• Close all running Outlook instances.
• On the computer which is having autocomplete names, go to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder
• Copy the file  profilename.NK2 . Here profilename is the name of outlook profile e.g. if my outlook profile name is sumit then file would be sumit.NK2 or it will be Outlook.NK2 if your outlook profile name is "Outlook" . If you are using Windows 7, then you can locate this file under C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook folder.

• Paste the file to the same location as above to the respective computer on which you want to populate the autocomplete feature. If the outlook user profile name is different on new computer where you are moving .NK2 file, then you MUST rename the file with the same Outlook user profile name after you copy it to the correct folder. For example, if you copied sumit.nk2 from the original computer with an Outlook user profile name of sumit, and if outlook profile name on the new computer is sumitnew , then you must rename sumit.nk2 to sumitnew.nk2 on new computer.

Open Outlook and you will be able to see the same autocomplete names which you were able

to see earlier !

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Sumit