Backing up the Outlook for Mac 2011 database

Office for Mac 2011 will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see these resources.

Applies to: Office for Mac 2011

Topic Last Modified: 2012-06-07

Outlook for Mac stores messages and other items, such as calendar events, contacts, tasks, and notes, as individual files. This allows you to back up your Outlook data by using Time Machine. If you turn on Time Machine, it automatically makes copies of every file on your computer on a regular basis. If a file gets damaged or lost, you can use Time Machine to browse through the backups and recover the copy of the file.

The first time that you open Outlook after restoring a Time Machine backup, Outlook rebuilds its database to accommodate the restored items. If you have a very large database, rebuilding the database might take a long time. If you want, you can exclude Outlook data from your Time Machine backups. You can set this option in Time Machine preferences by adding the /Users/username/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/ folder to the list of items to be excluded from backups.