Microsoft Outlook 2010 Auto-Complete Restore

Recently, one of my users lost all his auto-complete list from his mailbox! For me, this is no big deal as I barely send emails but for our employees who sends / receives hundreds of emails per day, it's a pretty big deal and a very practical feature to have. Outlook will create a little database of the email addresses that you send or receive emails from into a file generically called "Auto-Complete". In the previous versions of the Microsoft Office suite, this file was the famous "NK2" file. In the good old days, we used to have a couple of tools when we had a problem with the NK2 file, like "NK2Edit" or "NK2view"... But since the Outlook 2010 is different and the industry just starts to have problems with the new "Auto-Complete" files, there is not a lot of tool to analyse or repair these files, yet!


So, what we have done to help our user. My IT technician colleague found a functional procedure of how to recover this "Auto-Complete" database file from an older backup. (You should always have backups :)) As it was not clear on any forum on the internet, I decided to write about it... Not only for you guys, but for me too so if I don't remember the next time, I hope I will remember that I had an article on it :)
So let's start;




In a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 system the "Auto-Complete" file can be found under this path;
"%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Roamcache"


the file name will look like this;
"Stream_Autocomplete_0_bunchofdigits_GUID.dat"


If this file is deleted or modified while OUTLOOK is closed... Outlook creates and replaces the file with a new one when you start the Outlook 2010 next time.


1- Recover your old "Stream_Autocomplete_0_bunchofdigits_GUID.dat" file from your backups.


2- Open Outlook 2010 and browse to the folder "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Roamcache"


3- Paste the recovered autocomplete file into this folder. (Always while Outlook is running!!)


4- Copy the file name of the original autocomplete file and rename the "restored autocomplete" file with this one. If you are asked delete or replace the existing file with your restored "autocomplete" file.


5- Close and start back Outlook 2010 & Voilà!