Email Backup: 7 Things You Should Know

MicahJWaters | Jun 7, 2010 |

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While most computer users (business and personal alike) are aware of the importance of backing up critical documents and files, many forget to backup their email, especially if they are using a web-based email service. Most of us rely heavily on our email and save countless messages, attachments and addresses that would be difficult (if not impossible) to replace. Here are ten things you should know about email backup that can help you make it a part of your routine backup.

Email backup can be as simple as burning important data to a CD-RW or using a web-based backup service. Choose a solution that is user friendly, affordable and most importantly, can effectively backup and restore (if needed) your data.
Email backup should be performed regularly, the frequency depending on how often you receive emails that need to be backed up. If you receive several emails a day, consider backing up daily or at the very least, weekly.
There is no need to backup your entire address book every time you add a new contact. Backup your entire address book the first time you ever backup it and then backup new contacts once they are added.
Even if you use a web-based email service (such as Gmail or Hotmail), consider creating local backups; if something were to ever happen to the service, you may not be able to ever recover all your emails.
As with any backups, always make sure to keep backups offsite. This means, whether on DVDs or an external hard drive, the backups need to be kept in a different vicinity than the originals. Using a backup service remedies this issue since backups are kept on a remote offsite server, likely hundreds of miles from your location.
In case of an email outage or data loss, make sure you know the recovery process of your email backup solution so you can easily and quickly restore historical email.
If you use Microsoft Outlook email client, there are a handful of online tutorials and articles that clearly explain how to find where Outlook stores the emails on your hard drive and how to backup the emails up.