Can you sync Outlook PST files with OneDrive?

PST, the short form of Personal Storage Table, is a type of Microsoft Outlook data file. Your important Microsoft Outlook data will be stored in PST files, such as emails, contacts, email attachments, appointments, and so on.

To protect your Outlook data better, you may want to upload PST files to your cloud drive. Besides, PST files can take up much local storage space. To free up storage space on your computer, uploading to a cloud is a nice choice.

As a cloud service provided by Microsoft, OneDrive is a suitable destination for your PST files. But you may hear that OneDrive desktop client cannot sync PST files before. Why are PST files not allowed in OneDrive? Because OneDrive cannot back up the opened PST files that are locked by the Outlook application. You will get corrupted PST files and cannot restore them to the data you need if you have backed up the opened PST files to OneDrive or other clouds, causing data loss.

Can OneDrive sync PST files? Don’t worry, for this, we have prepared 3 useful ways to upload PST to OneDrive. You can upload your PST files to OneDrive manually, or try another easy method to sync PST files to OneDrive automatically.

How to upload PST to OneDrive: 3 ways

How to save PST files to OneDrive? To use official ways, you can only upload PST files to OneDrive manually. If you want to sync or backup PST file to OneDrive regularly, you can consider using a free cloud service to help you.

★Tips:

Before getting to know how to transfer PST to OneDrive, you need to find your PST files first. Generally, the path of PST files is C:\Users\[username]\OneDrive\Documents\Outlook Files.

And you need to remember, do not open the PST files when you need to upload them to OneDrive.

Way 1. Upload PST to OneDrive on web

To upload PST files to OneDrive, you can go to the OneDrive official website directly. You can upload files or folder without downloading extra software, but it requires you to perform manually.

1. Head to the OneDrive website. Sign into your own account.

2. Choose the Files tab on the left menu. Then click on the Upload icon to select Files. Choose PST files from your computer to add to OneDrive here.

Way 2. Upload PST to OneDrive by dragging and dropping

OneDrive provides a desktop client but it cannot sync PST files automatically. However, once you set up the OneDrive desktop application on your computer, you will have a OneDrive folder. To upload PST files to OneDrive, you can drag and drop them into this folder manually.

Let’s see how to upload PST files to OneDrive via OneDrive desktop app in details:

1. After downloading and installing the OneDrive client, run it. Enter your email address to sign into your OneDrive account on this page.

2. It will tell you the OneDrive folder location here. If you want to change the location, click on the Change location link to choose another place for your OneDrive folder.

3. After the above, a OneDrive folder will show up on your computer. Just drag and drop your PST files to this folder manually. Then the PST files will be uploaded to OneDrive.

Way 3. Upload PST to OneDrive regularly

Since both of the 2 methods above require you to perform the uploading task manually, it will take you much time and effort. Maybe you will forget to sync the latest version of PST files to OneDrive in time, which will cause data loss unfortunately.

Here, we highly recommend you a free cloud backup service - CBackup.

• You can use the Sync PC to Public Cloud feature in it to upload any type of file to Dropbox, such as PST files, Word files, Excel files, ZIP files, and so on.
• What’s more, there is a Scheduler feature in CBackup that can be used for free. With it, you can create schedule OneDrive sync to save much time and effort.
• In addition to uploading files to OneDrive, you can upload files to any cloud drive like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

You can click on the Download CBackup button to get such a reliable software on your computer. After installing it, please follow the easy guideline below to upload PST files to OneDrive automatically:

1. Sign up for a new CBackup account and open the desktop client to log into your new account.

2. Go to choose the Storage tab, and click on OneDrive > Authorize Now in turn. Follow the instructions CBackup provides to let it access your OneDrive account safely.

3. Go to the Sync section, and click on Sync PC to Public Cloud.

4. Choose your PST files on computer as the sync source. Then choose a folder in the OneDrive account as the sync destination.

5. Press the Settings button on the left bottom and you can enable the Scheduler feature to make your uploading task automated with the certain frequency you choose. After setting up, you can click on Start Sync on the New Sync Task page to upload PST to OneDrive automatically.

Note: There are also some other helpful features in CBackup and you can take advantage of them for free.

Combine cloud storage: To get more cloud storage for free, you can use this feature to merge unlimited free cloud drive accounts into one combined cloud.

Backup PC to public cloud: In addition to syncing, you can also backup Outlook PST to OneDrive via CBackup as well. Besides, Google Drive, Dropbox are supported to be the destination.

Free cloud storage space: CBackup provides each account free 10GB cloud storage in CBackup Cloud.

Bonus tip: Get more OneDrive storage for PST files

Generally, PST files can take up lots of storage space. If there is not enough storage space for PST files, you may meet the OneDrive not syncing issue. To avoid it, please make sure that there is enough storage space in your OneDrive account.

If you want a larger OneDrive cloud storage space for PST files, you can try the combine cloud storage feature in CBackup. You are allowed to merge as many cloud drive accounts as you have into a combined cloud. Your cloud drive accounts can all be from OneDrive, or belong to other cloud drive platforms.

1. In CBackup, add and authorize your OneDrive accounts likewise.

2. Go to the Storage section, and click on + Add Combined Cloud.

3. You can choose all the OneDrive accounts you have, and click on Next. After determining the order of your OneDrive cloud drives, then choose Combine to create a combined cloud.

Then, you will have a combined cloud in your cloud list. You can go to choose Backup > Backup PC to Combined Cloud to enjoy larger cloud storage, even unlimited OneDrive cloud storage for free.

The bottom line

We have introduced 3 ways to upload PST to OneDrive in this post. Both manual methods and automatic methods are included. You can choose a suitable way according to your need. If you do not want to spend too much time uploading PST files by yourself, you can try the free cloud service called CBackup directly.