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Backup Email - How to Backup Your Outlook Express Email

Let's say you want to cleanup your computer hard drive. It may be because things are starting to run slower now... much slower than when it was new.

Your drive is probably getting full but you want to backup and save those email messages you have been storing. Assuming you use MS Outlook Express (which most PC home users do), how do you back up your email?

The way to backup your email messages is not by copying them one by one from your email client software.

Find the Email Storage Folder

Use the following steps to locate where Outlook Express stores your messages:

• Start Outlook Express, click on the Tools menu and open the Options dialog box.

• Select the Maintenance tab in the Options dialog box and click the Store Folder button. A small dialog box pops up with the path string to the folder containing your emails. For the next two steps, you must be able to highlight, copy, and paste.

• Highlight then copy the path. You will now find the email files, by...

• Start either My Computer (double-click its icon on the desktop) OR Windows File Manager, and paste the item you copied (above) into the address field of My Computer/Windows File Manager. Press Go or Enter Key. Now you should see a number of .dbx files, and possibly some other files too.

Copy and Save the Files

The *.dbx files are what contain your email messages. You will notice they have the same names as the folder names in Outlook Express.

Copy these files to your Zip drive, CD-R, USB drive, or other backup medium. When you reinstall Outlook Express, for example, you can restore all the messages that are were in Outlook Express at the time you copied the files.

Restoring the E-Mail Files

To restore the files, you may either locate the storage folder as describes above and copy back the files or import the files using the Import command on the file menu of Outlook Express. Choose Import, then Messages, and follow the prompts.

The first restore option may not work easily if you reinstalled Windows. In that case, use the File-Import-Messages option. It works.

Special Note

If you made your backup to a CD-R you may just find that all your *.dbx files are read-only when you are ready to import them into your new system. The program will not let you install the files. You MUST reverse the read-only attribute of every one of these files before your messages will be imported into the new program.

To do this, just create a folder on your hard drive and copy these read-only files to that folder. Then select all the files you just copied, right-click your selection and choose properties. Uncheck the read-only option on the file properties dialog box.

You should now be able to import the files back into Outlook Express.

Note also that if you had any message rules set in your original installation of Outlook Express, these rules will not carry over in copy of the *.dbx files. You may have to re-create those message rules.

Hands-free Backup

If you want a hands-free backup of your email (regardless of client software), you might be better going with a good software option such as WinBackup. In fact, WinBackup™ makes it easier than ever before to secure your data by making regular backups.

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