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How
Do I Make Sure I Don't Lose My Emails
Email
is today's killer application - virtually everyone has an email
address and we exchange a multitude of messages daily with our
friends, family and colleagues. The really cool thing about
emails is that we can keep in touch instantaneously across vast
stretches of continents and oceans without the hassle of picking
up a pen, a paper, an envelope and stamps. Here's how you can
make sure that you never lose all those emails, attachments,
and data tied up in your mailbox.
A few years back I lived in Asia and it took
three weeks for my monthly reports to arrive back home about
11,000 km away. Today, I draft my report, pop open my Outlook
and within seconds my boss has a PDF sitting on his desktop
waiting to be read. My boss could be in the office, at home
or away on business - he'll still read his emails and all what
has been exchanged throughout the day and during his absence.
Based in Europe, I keep in touch with my friends
in Australia, customers in the States and collaborators in the
UK - all within the same working day. I can be party to all
the happenings without the weeks-long time delays I experienced
during my days on Hong Kong.
Your experience with emails is probably very
similar.
Have you ever noticed that when you are at
work you email your colleague who's in the cubicle next to you?
Not that you can't talk to her but usually email is quick and
efficient and we can keep up a conversation while doing our
jobs. To be honest I think it's so great to do that!
The Year of the Email
So you can imagine how much email we generate. Well, here
are some stats:
- IDC found that 13.5 trillion total emails
were transmitted in 2003. This figure is expected to rise
to 19.7 trillion in 2005 or a staggering 35 billion messages
(Meta Group).
- META Group research findings suggest that
emails represent 50% of total communicated corporate knowledge.
- The Radicati Group found that a typical corporate
user in 2003 received an average of 81 email messages per
day and send 29 emails per day. Average email attachment size
was 435 Kb.
- Radicati estimate that each user will send/receive
an average of 4.6Mb daily in 2005.
- Vanson Bourne on behalf of KVS, found that
80% of employees keep their emails after reading them and
at least 24% store them in their inbox while 78% store their
attachments within their mailbox database file system. Moreover,
75% of the working population have deleted an email and then
found it was important.
- The Yankee Group estimates that typical corporations
with 5000 employees accumulate nearly 4 terabytes of emails
every year or an average of 800 Mb per employee.
- In 2004, IDC found that 52.5% of respondents
to a survey it conducted stated that the main driver for the
demand of more data storage is the increased use of email.
With this amount of email, how do you make
sure that you don't lose them to accidental deletion, hardware
failure, virus attacks or laptop theft?
The answer is simple - backup and recovery management
software. I am not going in the merits of backing up, so don't
worry. I think I've harped on enough about it in my other articles.
What I mean to do, however, is to dissect your Outlook files
to make sure you lose none of your precious emails and attachments
in your mailbox folders and then tell you how you can use backup
to make sure that none of your emails are lost.
My Mailboxes, Shortcuts and Other Animals
When you open Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and
a host of other email applications you see a series of folders
and individual emails, tasks, attachments, contacts and appointments
that have been painstakingly built over the years to represent
your life at work and at home.
Losing any of this data can cause you serious
problems especially when your working day may revolve around
the emails you send and receive, around your appointments and
contacts. On a personal level, the loss may be as tragic if
not worse especially if you have items like digital photos and
messages from loved ones.
Most email readers store all your emails, attachments,
etc, in a single mailbox database file (Outlook calls
it a PST file). One accidental hit of the delete button and
you're history!
However, emails, contacts, appointments and
schedules are not the only things that may be lost. Your mailbox
database file also contains all your account settings.
Various email readers store attachments, preferences and
templates within that single file while Outlook, for example,
stores them elsewhere across a myriad of folders and each having
different bits of information. Email readers also store your
registry settings in separate files. Registry files (DAT)
are files that store information necessary to configure your
email applications (and other programmes). These files also
need to be backed up in case of any harmful intrusion or accidental
intrusion or hardware failure.
Backup software will backup these files for
you. However, these files are located all over your hard drive
and unless you know where to find them you will be burdened
with backing up all your hard drive, which isn't necessary and
will take up quite a lot of CD or DVD space.
Shortcuts are the answer. Shortcuts are
dynamic links to various files and folders that evolve as your
system evolves. They are, in effect, quick and automatic links
to all your important files. WinBackup is the only backup
software that has created a series of shortcuts to the more
popular applications including Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora
and Thunderbird. Just by ticking a checkbox next to the chosen
application, WinBackup will immediately and automatically select
all the files necessary to help you go back to your original
case of affairs before you lost your data.
Click to Enlarge
Don't Monkey with My Emails
However, most backup products take a file-centric approach.
In other words, it is backup that focuses on backing up the
file or files that contain this data. If that file gets corrupt,
you will never be able to retrieve any of the hundreds (or thousands)
of emails that are stored therein.
Also file-centric backup requires you to make
daily backups of incremental changes to make sure that you have
an exact replica of what is transpiring. This takes up a great
deal of storage space. Restores are replacement of files. So
if I lose my PST today, I have to replace today's file with
the last backed up PST file. This is ok if I lost my data today,
but what would happen if I know I deleted a particular email
5 days ago? Or was it 6 days ago? Anyway, you know what I mean:
I think I deleted the important email this week.
In this case, I would have to make a total backup of today's
PST, replace all the PST files until I find the deleted email,
export the deleted email, restore today's backup and import
the deleted email into today's backup. If you're lucky this
will only take you a couple of hours.
Outlook Agent: The Email Workhorse
The answer is simple. You can backup your PST files on a
weekly basis and use the WinBackup Outlook Agent to backup
the emails added during the week. The Outlook Agent is a
nifty feature found in WinBackup Professional that allows you
to backup and restore single emails. Through the WinBackup interface
that connects to Outlook automatically and transparently, you
can browse around and tick the emails you want backed up. You
can also set up an automatic search for all the emails that
you received and sent - WinBackup will then do the rest.
Restores are then a matter of loading
up WinBackup and simply browsing around the archive of
single emails and then restoring the email directly into Outlook.
Click to Enlarge
If you combine Shortcuts with Outlook Agent,
you will find that backing up emails is a very easy process
and you can rest assured that you will not lose any of your
emails.
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