Creating Outlook Backups

Whether you use e-mails to stay in touch with your friends or family or for business purposes, one thing is important; you need to have a backup of those e-mails, if you care about them. I have seen in many cases that one trivial e-mail can be   a life saver in the future, and I’m talking about business here.

It is amazing how e-mail is been adopted as the sole medium of communication among businesses for almost for everything, transactions, contracts, information etc, and people don’t seem to care about ensuring this information is going to be available when needed. as you might already know, information on a computer is not very reliable, unexpected crashes, erroneous deletions, etc, can wipe off the information out of the hard drive forever. So how do you protect yourself? do backups.

Doing routine backups in Outlook is very simple, I recommend doing this procedure at least once a month to make sure you have a full backup of your e-mails. this tutorial should work on Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.

When you open outlook go to File and choose Import and Export:

The Import and Export Wizard should come up. Choose Export to a file and click Next.

Next, select Personal Folder File (.pst) and click next.

Next, select Mailbox ““ your name:

Make sure you check Include subfolders. that will export all the folders under mailbox and subfolders you might have created under folders like the inbox.

Click next.  Next you will be asked where you want to save the file:

I recommend saving the file in a quick accessible area like ” My Documents” so click on Browse and choose My Documents as the repository location. ideally, you could create a folder in My Documents just for this e-mails backup.

You also have 3 options on this window, make your mind about what you want, I think the default option is fine. Click on Finish.

The exporting process should begin. after that you should have a PST file on the location you specified. Burn the file onto a CD /DVD or flash drive, and keep it as your current backup.