Outlook Hard Drive Crashed - can I add events back to the calendar from invitees?

[CParah]

I had to replace my hard drive (nothing was salvageable on it) and I lost all of my events, however, I invited others to the events. Is there a way to add the events back from an invitee? I tried having them send me an event accepted email, but it just says - This meeting is not in the calendar, it may have been moved or deleted.

 

[Ian]

Welcome to the forums @CParah . Sorry to hear that your drive bit the dust, I know what a pain that can be!

I don't think there's a way to do what you are asking unfortunately. I'm guessing you're storing calendar information locally, rather than using an Exchange/Office365/Google server? There are some free options to store your calendar information on a cloud server so that you can just sync to recover the data (and access it on your phone, etc...). Not much help now, but may help you out should it happen again in the future.

Have you still got the hard drive? There are data recovery tools that may help you get back some data, but perhaps you have already tried this.

 

[CParah]

Hard drive is fried, there's no way to retrieve data, unfortunately. Sounds like I'll be manually adding 41 events back into my calendar I was able to import most of my contacts from Zoho, but the fields didn't match up correctly so some data was lost in translation.

I am using Office 2007 on a work computer so unless I want to spring for Office365 out of my pocket I'll need to look at a different cloud server. Anything free out there?

Welcome to the forums @CParah . Sorry to hear that your drive bit the dust, I know what a pain that can be!

I don't think there's a way to do what you are asking unfortunately. I'm guessing you're storing calendar information locally, rather than using an Exchange/Office365/Google server? There are some free options to store your calendar information on a cloud server so that you can just sync to recover the data (and access it on your phone, etc...). Not much help now, but may help you out should it happen again in the future.

Have you still got the hard drive? There are data recovery tools that may help you get back some data, but perhaps you have already tried this.

 

[Ian]

Hard drive is fried, there's no way to retrieve data, unfortunately. Sounds like I'll be manually adding 41 events back into my calendar I was able to import most of my contacts from Zoho, but the fields didn't match up correctly so some data was lost in translation.

Damn. On the bright side, at least 41 events is do-able, even if it's a pain .

I am using Office 2007 on a work computer so unless I want to spring for Office365 out of my pocket I'll need to look at a different cloud server. Anything free out there?

Google Calendar is free and works well . I think Microsoft offer free Calendar accounts with Outlook.com too - I've got one from an old Hotmail account that I don't use, so I assume they still offer it.

 

[CParah]

Well, the stars must be aligned right today...I found a way to get them into my calendar without having to manually enter them all in. I used FORWARD from an invitee's event and emailed to myself and it worked! YES! - In order for this to work you need to send it to yourself at a different email than the one you used to invite them.

 

[Ian]

That's great news! I couldn't see a way to do this online, so thank you for posting how you got it working - as I'm sure it'll be of help to someone else.

Good work .

 

[CParah]

That's great news! I couldn't see a way to do this online, so thank you for posting how you got it working - as I'm sure it'll be of help to someone else.

Good work .

I can't tell you how happy I am that this worked...turns out it was 55 recurring events. All the event names now start with FW:, but not having to enter all those events in manually ROCKS! Thanks for your input. Hope this will save folks from pulling their hair out if it happens to them.

I also discovered that even though no cloud sync will backup the outlook.pst file, you can trick it by creating a backup and changing the name to outlook.bak. I'm all backed up now!