merge address books-contacts-emails

P

pegdc

Because of stolen computer, and unlucky hard drive failure, I find myself
in a unique and baffling situation. My goal is to merge various Archive PST
and Contacts, Current PST and Contacts, and also merge these to other backups
of the same name on another laptop, a recovery file from a Data Recovery
Service and another hard dive.

what I need: All Contacts and All Addresses and All Email on one Computer
and can look at all open, de-duplicate, find lost addresses, merge with a
colleague's PST they have given me of emails and contacts. (This is over 20
gigs of materials) I need to save the attachments with each email and this
ranges into the 1000's of attachments.

Goal: Lump it all together so I can see everything to preform manual
deletes, computer and manual deduplications, transfer some notes in some
fields and recover data and materials.

Let's Start Simple: Currently on my new Dell (SP2 2003 not running the
Microsoft Busiiness Relationship Manager.)

Computer 1 (Peggy's New Computer the Dell)
a) Contacts
b) Contacts in Personal Folders
c) Collected Contacts
(I need to merge all these and deduplicate, but be aware that some files are
not the latest based on their date. I will need to review to make sure that
I same data in the notes field.

PST
a) Personal Folders
b) Archive Folders
c) Personal Folders (2) It appears
I need to merge all email together so that I can do some historical tracking
and recover lost attachments, etc.

-------------------------------------------
Intermediate Computer (used temp after laptop was stolen) - The toshiba
(which also had some very old files I need to recover off it as well) and a
couple of months of email and contacts mixed in with old emails and contacts.
(2 months of pst - contacts that I need to merge into above)
(an older archive of pst and contacts that I need to merge to above.

-------------------------------------------
hard Drive from Computer 3 (laptop hard drive_
an older hard drive direct from Laptop with
pst and archive and contacts I need to merge with all above

--------------------------------------------

PST and archive files found on another disk drive/backup system.

-------------------------------------------

It is impossible (I may be wrong) to de-duplicate due to most recent dates
not necessarily reflecting the most accurate information, so I can't
deduplicate across the entire contact database without feeling that I will
lose some notes or data. I need to make sure that all data rolls over into
the new contacts. Also - I am using MapiLabs for some of their software -
but not sure the best deduplication software, etc.

-----------------------------------------
I recovered some contacts as to their email from linkedin.com
They were added to one of the contact files with just the email addresses.
Prior dated - year before had some of the contacts with their mailing
addresses.
I need to merge old and new data.

---------------------------------------

I recovered another database from a work colleague. Possible deduplications.

-------------------------------------

This is likely about 100,000 emails or so personally.
This is likely thousands of names in chunks of my databases personally of
contacts (I do pro-bono work for an association, have email discussion lists
for more than 10 years, and my own client and persronal databases, and do
work for conferences, where I keep contact lists of speakers, and their
handlinge agents, and public relations firm.

I use lookout - but what I need to do is search across all databases for
information both email, attachments, contacts, notes and task lists.

I also write books so merging task lists is important - but I need to worry
about emails and contacts first. I receive permissions to reprint segments
by email, and often reports and graphics by email.

Swamped and Confused.
Please tell me the best process to get started on this - any software I
should buy for this.

Best Regards,
Peg
 
B

Brian Tillman

pegdc said:
what I need: All Contacts and All Addresses and All Email on one
Computer and can look at all open, de-duplicate, find lost addresses,
merge with a colleague's PST they have given me of emails and
contacts. (This is over 20 gigs of materials) I need to save the
attachments with each email and this ranges into the 1000's of
attachments.

Goal: Lump it all together so I can see everything to preform manual
deletes, computer and manual deduplications, transfer some notes in
some fields and recover data and materials.

First, get all the PSTs on a single PC. Then, in Outlook, open all of them
with File>Open>Outlook Data File and copy the contents of the folders from
whatever folders you want to whatever folders you want. You might also
consider buying or downloading an de-duplicating tool from
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/contacts.htm#dupes
 

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