Backing Up Your Emails

Even when people back up their important files (business accounts and documents, pictures, music collection, etc), emails are often left out. That's a pity, as losing our stored emails would be quite a disaster, especially as many of us organise our saved emails into folders.

In those folders, we store all sorts of important information, including: access details (username, password) for some software or websites; email addresses; copies of documents sent to us as attachments to messages; other attachments, such as pictures; messages containing information we want to store.

Just looking at that list gives us some indication of how much important information could be lost if emails could not be retrieved in the event of the failure of, say, a hard disk.

Backing up emails is not hard, and there is free software to make the process painless. The choice of program to use depends to an extent on how you access your emails. Those of you who go to a website for your emails (so-called "webmail") need not fret, as your emails are stored and organised away from your hard disk. Webmail is possibly the safest way, and also allows you to send and receive emails wherever you can connect to the internet.

However, many of us choose to use a program that uses our computer's hard disk to collect, send, and store our messages.

I use Mozilla's Thunderbird as my email program, and there is a useful backup program called MozBackup that not only backs up my emails, but also backs up Mozilla's Firefox browser.

For those of you who use Microsoft's Outlook or Outlook Express there are some choices to be had; the best thing is to go to the best information on this topic, at:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-email-backup-utility.htm

So, I strongly recommend backing up your emails, and like all backups, store your backups somewhere away from your main hard disk - on a memory stick, or an external hard drive, for example.