Backing up Outlook Express email

In the previous post we looked at backing up your “my documents”. This post will discuss backing up your Outlook Express emails. (next post will discuss backing up emails in Mozilla Thunderbird).

So what needs to be backed up.

1. Email messages and your personal folders

2. Your Address Book

3. Account Settings

I like to create a folder with 3 individual sub folders on your backup medium so that you have a place to store each of the 3 items listed above.

So the folders you create on your backup will be;

EmailBackup and this folder will contain 3 folders (Messages, Addresses and Settings).

So depending on whether you have a rewritable CD or DVD or Removable hard drive or flash drive for your backup you will need to open Windows Explorer and in the left hand window navigate and find the removable drive (or CD / DVD).

Highlight the drive in the left hand window of explorer and then select the menu options file / new / folder. Now you can type the name EmailBackup.

Once you have this folder created you can navigate into this folder and create 3 separate folders called Messages, Addresses, and settings.

So the above steps have created the folders which will contain your Outlook Express backups.

1. Backup Messages

So lets find the files you need to backup.

From within Outlook Express select Tools | Options | Maintenance, click the StoreFolder icon. You will see a dialog with the name of the folder that has your mail files.

Look in that directory in windows explorer and find files named after your mail folders and news groups. They all have a .DBX extension. These are the files you need to get to backup your email messages and folders.

So you will need to navigate to the folder that you found above and select all the files and choose edit and copy from your menu. Then navigate to the messages folder you created on your backup and choose paste to send these files to your backup location.

2. Backup Addresses

Your address book will be a file with your username and a .wab extension (username.wab)

Find the file by using Windows find. Click Start / Find / Files or Folders.

In the name box type *.wab and ensure that the drive being searched is c:\ (or other if windows is on a different drive).

Click find now.

This should find the Microsoft Outlook Express address book, if present. normally, this file will be the Outlook Express user’s name.

Once this file is located, select the file and choose edit / copy then navigate to the addresses folder created on your backup disk and choose paste.

You now have your address book backed up.

3. Backing up your Outlook Express Settings

I like to get users to save their Outlook settings using the tools menu.

Open Outlook Express: click Tools | Accounts | Export and specify the name of the file to save the settings. Make sure that this file is saved to the Settings folder that you created on your backup drive. Be sure also to save this information for every account if you have more than one.

So you have now backed up all messages addresses and settings for Outlook Express.

Next Post will show how to backup emails for Mozilla Thunderbird.

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