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How
to create an Outlook Express Backup
Author:
Emil Malmberg
Most
Windows users should be familiar with Microsoft Outlook Express.
This email program is usually installed with the Windows operating
system and is probably among the most commonly used email program
today. While using Outlook Express is fairly easy, finding and
backing up the emails can be a little more complicated. Since
there is a large number of files and folders on a normal computer
running Windows the first problem is to find the files containing
your emails. Outlook Express stores emails in .dbx files and there
might be several different dbx files depending on how many email
folders you have created in Outlook Express. If you are using
Windows 98 you can probably locate your emails somewhere in the
Windows directory. In Windows 2000 emails are usually stored somewhere
in the user data folder.
Locating
the email store folder The easiest way to find out exactly where
your emails are stored is to start Outlook Express, go to the
tools menu and open the options dialog. In the option dialog select
the maintenance page and click on the Store Folder button. Here
you can find the path to the folder containing your emails. To
open the folder, copy the path and paste in in the address field
of the windows file manager. You should see a number of dbx files
and possibly some other files too. When using WinBackup you can
simply skip this step since WinBackup automatically finds your
emails and adds an email icon to User Data section if you are
using Outlook Express. WinBackup also locates and backups your
address book which if often not included in the email folder.
Screenshot
from WinBackup
Backing
up your emails After locating the email folder you could include
this folder in backups to backup your emails. Make sure that your
backup program does not try to lock the files while running a
backup since this will cause file-sharing problems whenever Outlook
Express is running. If you are using WinBackup this should not
be a problem since WinBackup does not attempt to lock files and
can therefore backup your emails while outlook is running without
causing any file sharing problems. You can also try to copy the
emails to a new folder before running a backup to avoid file-sharing
problems, or you could simply close Outook Express whenever a
backup operation is started.
Restoring
your emails To restore your emails, locate the email folder as
described above and restore the email files to this folder. If
you have reinstalled Windows you might have to restore the files
to a different folder that could possibly cause some problems.
If you are using WinBackup you can simply select the emails item
on the restore page. WinBackup will automatically find the email
folder and restore your emails. WinBackup can also restore your
address book if your select this icon on the restore page. When
restoring emails it is important to realize that any existing
emails will be removed unless they are located in folders that
do not exist in the backup.
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This
article is written by a guest writer. The views and opinions within
this article are those of the author and are not those of Detechnify.com
You
can get details of the writer at the end of the article.
About
the author:
Software developer for LIUtilities ( www.liutilities.com
)
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