Enterprises and individuals rely largely on emails to store all their personal, financial, business, and family information. All this hangs around in the inbox or email folders, ready to be accessed at any time. If the inbox is corrupted, or the webmail account is hacked, or any number of worst-case scenarios arises, you could find that precious data is gone forever.
All your email archives (Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook) are stored on the hard drives. If a computer crashes, a virus attacks, or any program messes up the information on the hard drive, then all the important email information is lost. Don’t let that happen to you. To make sure you don’t lose all this in case of a hard disk crash or some other disaster, you can create backup copies of your emails.
All your mails, contacts, calendars, and almost every other detail you use are in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. Email programs seem quite simple, but in terms of structure, folders, and information, they are quite complex. Each email program stores data in different places on your hard drive. Besides the messages in your inbox and your personal address book, your email program also keeps track of the folders you use to sort your mails, your email profile and much more. To do a thorough backup you will need to backup a variety of folders and files, but backing up your mail data is still easy.
The simplest way to backup information in you email program is to use a Backup Program/Software. A lot depends on which email client you are using. The easiest way to transfer your email messages, address book, accounts and other information is with the help of a third-party utility that can back it up at one end and then restore it all with the minimum of fuss.
The other way to backup your emails is to simply copy them to another folder on your computer or an alternate drive. Below are the steps explaining how you can backup emails from Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook.
Steps to backup emails in Outlook Express:
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Create a folder on your hard drive, something like “OEbackup”.
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Now, find the special location of the email folders on you hard drive.
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To do that, from the Outlook Express menu bar, click on Tools-> Options-> Maintenance tab-> Store Folder.
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When you click the Store Folder button, a window will pop-up with the path for the emails and email folders on the hard drive.
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Copy it and paste the same into the Run dialogue box (Start->Run) and click OK.
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This will show all of the items in Outlook Express Store Location.
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Outlook Express folders end with the three letters DBX, simply copy them and paste it into the OEbackup folder first created.
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You can also copy the files and folders to another storage media like a pen drive, external hard drive etc…
Steps to backup emails in Microsoft Outlook:
The Personal Folder file (.pst / PST) is the place where Outlook stores its data. Personal Folder file contains all of your Outlook folders, including the Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts. You may have a single .pst file, and you may also have an additional .pst file that you use to archive messages Below are the simple steps to backup your PST files. By backing up these PST files you will be backing up all your Outlook information.
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Firstly, you need to find the location of your data files.
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From Microsoft Outlook menu bar click File->Data File Management->Data Files.
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Highlight the Personal Folders and click on the “Open Folder…” icon. Clicking on this icon will automatically launch Windows Explorer and take you to the location where this data file is stored.
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Within the folder you will find an outlook.pst file. Copy this file to another safe location on the hard drive or to another storage media like a zip disk, CDROM, external hard drive etc.
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You will need to completely exit Outlook prior to copying these files.
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In case of any damage to the original outlook mails you can easily, import the .pst files from the backup.
