Thread: Backup your outlook mail

Business email and contacts are precious assets in the corporate world. Yet most executives do not even think about backing up this important data. Yes, there are other alternatives to mail on the desktop. For instance, high-end mobile phones such as the iconic Blackberry, can be synched with email systems and receive Push mail. You could also store your email in the cloud with services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and others. But this story is really for those who use POP3 email clients on a Pc.

As a matter of policy one should always make backup copies of important data stored on the PC, and it includes email and address books. Viruses can play spoilsport; nobody escapes system crashes with data corruption. Of course, there are other reasons for backing up, for instance, you may want to transfer your downloaded messages and the address book to another device such as a laptop or smart phone.

There's a compelling reason for backing up Outlook email too. Outlook data files have a file size limitation of 2GB. This limit can be increased through a registry tweak, although we don't recommend it. So after a year or so of usage the message data files approach this file size limitation and Outlook starts complaining with warning messages.



There's a temporary workaround-"the AutoArchive feature of Outlook. To configure and use it go to 'Tools I Options' and look within the 'Other' tab. But what happens when the archive file itself swells to a huge size? Then it's time to consider making multiple archive files, perhaps one for each year.

This workshop is based on Microsoft Outlook 2003, but the concepts explained here are generally applicable to any other email client. Of course, exact storage locations of data files and file formats will differ, even among different versions of Microsoft Outlook.

In this workshop we show different ways to backup Outlook email. Use the method that suits you.