How to Fix Disappeared Contacts in Outlook 2007

My Dad came to me this morning stating his contacts in Outlook had "disappeared". That didn't bode well- usually with my Dad it's user error and there's no fixing it. But I bravely tried to figure it out. It wasn't user error for once! Here's how we fixed it:

So the outlook contacts was giving us a little blurb about "Unable to Load Folder." This, to me, meant I had to find the folder and what was wrong with it. All it would tell me when I went into properties was that it was in "\\Personal Folders\Contacts"...but it wasn't in his User's contacts. Hmm...it didn't seem to exist. I needed a REAL file path. I tried several things and in the end tried to trash it just to see what would happen- and I got an error that gave me the file path I needed: User\AppData\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst

I then loaded the preferences for that file, which was faithfully sitting where it was supposed to be. One of the options in the preferences was to recover the file from a backup essentially- I forget the actual wording. I asked my Dad if I could recover from the latest one- the 31st, and he said sure. It took about 5 minutes for it to recover the previous incarnation of the file, and I had to shut down Outlook to do it, but when I started Outlook back up- there they were: all his contacts, back where they were meant to be.

Hope this helps someone who might have the same issue!