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How
to create an Outlook Express Backup
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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