Back up your Outlook Email

If you don't have an Exchange Server, it's likely that your email isn't being backed up.  Fortunately, with Microsoft Outlook, it's not very difficult to create a copy of your email, contacts, calendar, and other Outlook data. While this isn't a complete backup solution, you can at least take the current state of your Outlook data and store it elsewhere for safe keeping in the event of data loss or a hardware malfunction that causes you to lose your precious data.

• Go to your Outlook folder (in Outlook, go to File > Data File Management, highlight your main data file, usually called Personal Folders, and click Open Folder.)
• Highlight all files ending in .pst, and double check that outlook.pst and archive.pst are included, those are the most important.
• Select Edit > Copy from the menu to copy the selected files.
• Create a folder somewhere else (a location on the server that gets backed up works great!) and open that folder.
• Select Edit > Paste from the menu in that folder to paste the files into the new location.
• This doesn't automatically backup your mail, so you'll want to repeat this every so often to keep the backup up to date.

Of course, you may want to consider a full-scale backup solution that manages your servers.  If your company does a lot of email corresponding, you should also consider Exchange, which gives you a lot of control and features, such as mailing groups, synchronized calendars, and better backup procedures.  Manual backup solutions are far too error-prone to be considered the end-all of backup solutions.  To learn more about how you can ensure that your files, documents, and inboxes are backed up, contact us.