How do I recover lost OUTLOOK contacts and calendar?

Question

When trying to set up an outlook POP for GMail I removed the 'exchange server' that I thought was associated with a former employer. This apparently deleted my off-line contacts and my calendar. I cannot restore them. Would contacts and calendar live in PST or OST files? I have found a couple of big pst files but I can't seem to link them into outlook.

Answer 1

This all depends on how you had Outlook/Exchange set up initially. Some setups save all data to the Exchange server. If so, your data is on that server, and probably lost to you. Some setups also use .pst files to store data locally. Since you have large .pst files, and I assume you could access this data even when not connected to the Exchange server, this was probably your setup.
Do a search in explorer for .pst files, then note the location of all of them. The one you want is probably labeled outlook.pst, in your documents and settings folder for your user account (it will be buried deep under many subfolders; thus requiring the search to find it quickly.
When you set up your e-mail account in Outlook, have it point to the outlook.pst file as its data file. This should pull up your data. Linking is pretty straightforward through the wizard. If you can't do it for some reason, I can walk you through it.