What would happen if, right now, your email program crashed completely? And not just a normal crash, where you can start up the program again and everything is fine, but a catastrophic crash, where your email database and preferences were totally hosed, and all your information lost?
Not a pretty thought, is it?
I have no data to back up this next statement, but I would guess that the percentage of individual computer users who never back up anything is huge. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve never made a habit of backing up my hard drive. Sure, I’ll on occasion back up important documents, but if my entire hard drive were to crash, I’d lose a lot. And that’s kind of what I hear from friends and relatives as well… we all know we should backup our information, but either it’s too much of a hassle, we keep forgetting, or it’s just not convenient.
With Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard), Apple tried to make it easy to back up everything, with an application called Time Machine. And I just found a nifty little utility called Email Backup that attempts to make the chore of backing up your computer’s email data a simple procedure as well.
First, do you use one of the following email programs?
Apple Mail
Microsoft Entourage v.X
Microsoft Entourage 2004
Thunderbird
Eudora
If not, I’m sorry, but you’ll need to find another solution. If the answer was “yes” then you’re in luck. You can use Email Backup. And it’s easy!
First, start up Email Backup and select your email program from the popup menu. Then select where you’ll want to save your backed up email information. I just selected my standard Documents folder, then created a new folder called Mail Backup.
Now, remember what I was saying about being too complicated, not handy and all that? Forget about all of that. With Email Backup, you just need to select a time for Email Backup to backup your mail, and on what days you want it to do it. Then, click to Save and you’re all set!
Seriously. That’s all you need to do. At the appointed time, Email Backup will find your email program’s mail files and back them up where you designated. It will do this at that time, every day you want it to, until you tell it to stop. Depending on how large an email archive you have, this could take a while, of course, but in my mind that’s a small price to pay for having all my emails backed up.
You can have Email Backup go through the process immediately (or at any time, actually), and when I did, I was even more pleased than I thought I’d be. Not only does Email Backup store my emails, but it also keeps track of any message rules I have set (for filtering), all my Smart Mailboxes, and even my email program’s settings. So if I do have a crash that wipes out everything, all I need to do is put those folders and files where they belong, and I won’t miss a beat.
This brings up one last point that actually has nothing to do with Email Backup. Be sure to keep these backed-up files in a safe place! If the only issue is your email program going on the fritz, you’ll be fine, but if you have a hard drive crash, you’ll lose the backed-up files in addition to the originals, so periodically burn them to CD, or copy them to a flash drive, a different hard drive, or an Internet-based backup service or storage website. You’ll be glad you did.
Back to the program, however. I think it’s great. It made backing up my emails incredibly easy, only needed to be set up the once, and as far as I could tell worked flawlessly. I actually went through the process (after backing up), of deleting my original mail files and replacing them with the backed up files, and didn’t notice any change. So if you’re looking for a fast, simple, easy to use email backup program, I recommend Email Backup. It could definitely save you a lot of grief! So go ahead and download it; it works as advertised (better, really), and it’s free!
