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.
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