How to Backup Microsoft Outlook Regularly

Backups are an integral part of data security and integrity plans. A hard drive crash, theft or any other incident that would remove or damage data could result in severe data loss if no backups would be available that could be used to restore the system to its previous state.

Emails are nowadays one of the most important means of communication. They do not only contain personal or business details but also information about purchases, signups and other relevant information that are important to users.

Making sure that emails get backed up regularly ensures that it is always possible to restore them if data loss should occur.

Personal Folders Backup is an add-in for the email clients Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2002. It can be downloaded freely from the official Microsoft website. It can be installed just like any other software that gets installed on a computer system. The only thing that the user has to make sure is that the installed version of Microsoft Outlook is closed before starting the setup.

The installation will add the add-in to the Microsoft Outlook installation. It will add a Backup entry to the file menu in Microsoft Outlook which can be used to save or open backups and to configure the backup process.

A click on the Backup link in the File menu will open the Outlook Personal Folders Backup menu.

A click on Save Backup will schedule a backup during the next shutdown process of Microsoft Outlook using the default values of the backup program. The add-in will display the folders that will be backed up in the process.

All Outlook data is usually stored in so called .pst files which is the file format for Personal Folders Files.

Each .pst file contains all of your Outlook folders, including the Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts. You can have a single .pst file but you can also have an additional .pst file that you use for archiving. Using the Personal Folders Backup tool, you can back up any or all of these .pst files.

Outlook Personal Folders Backup will therefore backup all information of an Outlook account including the important emails, contacts of an address book and appointments in the calendar.

A click on options will open configuration options. It is possible to select the personal folders that should be backed up and the file location where the backups should be stored. It is furthermore possible to configure a reminder that will remind the user after x days about the backups.

Creating backups makes only sense if there is a way to restore the data that has been backed up. Outlook Personal Folders Backup comes with the means to restore the previously backed up data.

A click on the Open Backup button will open a previously created backup in Microsoft Outlook. Opening the Personal Folders backup will for instance add the same structure containing all mails and other information in the list of configured mail folders. It is then possible to drag and drop mails and other information from the backup mail folders to the original ones thus restoring any information that gets transferred.

The backup software will display information about the last backup once at least one backup has been created using the Outlook add-in. This can be helpful to determine if a new backup should be created.