Tutorial- Manually Backup & Restore Outlook PIM- calendar|contacts|tasks- directly from Windows Mobile device to SD|MMC Card

03 Apr

Posted by Abdul Aziz as Tips, Tutorials, Windows Mobile

How many times have you had to do a hard reset of your Windows Mobile device without being able to synchronize the most current data from the mobile to Outlook on your computer?

To avoid such situations, you can backup a file called pim.vol directly to your SD/MMC storage Card.

Important: This will only work if you are backing up and restoring pim.vol from the same Windows Mobile/AKU type. For example, you cannot restore a pim.vol from a Windows Mobile 5 AKU 2 device to a Windows Mobile 2003 or Windows Mobile 5 AKU 3.2 device.

Pim.vol is database in the root of your mobile device that contains the database of your contacts, calendar, call history and tasks stored on your mobile device.

To Manually Backup your Outlook PIM database to a Storage card:

-Open Windows Mobile’s built-in File Explorer (Resco File explorer or any other 3rd party File Explorer will not work)
-Go to Root Directory of your device
-Copy pim.vol (If it is not visible, tap Menu and then Show All Files)
-Paste the pim.vol to your SD/MMC storage card

To Manually Restore your the pim.vol:

-Open File Explorer or Resco File Explorer
-Go to Root Directory of your device
-Rename the existing pim.vol to something else like pim.old
-Copy the pim.vol that you have on your SD/MMC storage card into the original location
-Perform a soft reset of your mobile device
-Delete the renamed pim.old file from the root of your device
-Just in case, Soft reset the device again

All your contacts, calendar, tasks and call history should be restored

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3 Responses

Gary Giallonardo

April 13th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
1

I have a new desktop computer using MS-Vista and MS-Office 2007, plus I have a new Treo 700wx PDA with the Windows Mobile operating system. With only 64 MB of user memory in the PDA, is there a way to transfer a very-large Outlook data file to the SD card, which I can increase to well beyond 1GB? I run a consulting business and have over 7,000 contacts, plus a pretty full calendar that I keep in Outlook 2007. I’m having no luck synchronizing such a large Outlook file to the limited internal Pocket PC memory.

Thanks,

Gary Giallonardo
MO

April 18th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
2

Not exactly what you asked for but: On that device you can select that all email attachments get stored on the storage card, that should help a bit.
Matt G

December 4th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
3

Hi, I’ve used these pim.vol back instructions successfully in the past, thanks. This time though, my Orange SPV M3100 handset has been replaced and restoring my old pim.vol to my new handset does not work. It changes the file size and then crashes Contacts. I suspect there has been a firmware update between my old handset and the new one. Is there any way of converting the pim.vol or extracting the data to use iin some other way?

Thanks,
Matt