Outlook 2010 backup error 0x80070021

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I have set up pfbackup.exe in Outlook 2010 and it has been working correctly for about 2 years. It prompts me to ‘Save Backup’ upon exiting from Outlook and when I click on the button, it copies the .pst files to my designated backup folder.

A few days ago, instead of backing up the .pst files, I received the error 0x80070021 and none of the control buttons (Retry, Skip Cancel) responded. I had to stop the copy process using Task Manager and of course, the backup did not work.

I also noticed that the target backup file had disappeared from the destination folder, so I had to manually copy the file there. Manually launching the backup then worked.

After some research online, I found an article that seemed to describe my problem and the recommendation was to remove ‘Search Email Indexer’ from COM Add-Ins in Outlook, which I did. The backup then worked. I therefore thought that it solved my problem.

The next day, however, the exact same 0x80070021 error appeared, with the same symptoms as described above and backup does not work.

I would be very grateful if someone cleverer than me could help me resolve this.

useful :confused:

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I have Outlook 2016, and have made my own backup utility as a batch file, just using COPY. I have it running as a scheduled task in the background,so it doesn’t disturb my work when it runs, but you could just run it on demand if you like, for example after exiting Outlook. The trick is to not allow the COPY to run if Outlook is running, because the .pst files cannot be accessed and it will result in empty files being sent to the backup location, but the batch file takes care of that. Here’s the relevant part of the batch file – which you can customize to your own requirements. The tasklist command checks to see if a task called OUTLOOK.EXE is running, then the list command examines the output from tasklist. If it returns 0 then it means Outlook is running, so don’t do the copy.

::
:: Outlook PST files backup – check if Outlook is running.
::
tasklist /FI “imagename eq OUTLOOK.EXE” | find /I /N “OUTLOOK.EXE”
if “%ERRORLEVEL%”==”0” goto nocopy
::
:: Outlook not running, so copy the PST files.
::
cd “E:Outlook PST Files” (Or whatever your default location is for the .pst files)
copy outlook.pst “S:Outlook Backup” (Or where you want to put the backups)
copy archive.pst “S:Outlook Backup”
::
:nocopy
::

To run a scheduled task in the background, the trick is to run it under a different user who is not logged on. Create a user just for this purpose (I call mine SUBTASK), then create the scheduled task to be run by that user, but with the option to run it even if the user is not logged on. Because the user is not logged on, nothing happens on the screen when the task runs. If you want to run it as a scheduled task, you can set it to run automatically every x minutes, or once a day, or al logon time, whatever.

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Thank you Bundaburra, I’ll give it a try.

Regards
useful 🙂

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