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Directive Blogs

Directive has been serving the Oneonta area since 1993, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Back up your Outlook Email

envelope with @ sign inside

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.