Backup Emails in Outlook Express, Part2

- This lesson follows on from the previous tutorial.

In the last lesson, you copied the location of where Outlook Express stores all your email folders. In this lesson, you'll now copy those folders, and then paste them to the backup folder you created. Off we go then.

Locate the Outlook Express store folder

We now need to open up the location we just copied. To do that, we can use the Run utility. So, do the following:

• Click your Start menu (probably in the bottom left of your screen)
• Then select Run, as in the image below:

When you click Start > Run, you'll see another box appear. If your Run dialogue box has anything in the Open text box area, click inside of it and then delete everything that's there. You should then have a blank text box. To copy the Outlook Express Store Location, do the following:

• With your Right mouse button, click inside of the Open text box
• From the menu, select Paste:

The contents of the Clipboard (our Store Location), will then be pasted to the Open text box, as in the following image:

Click OK on the Run box.

If you were successful, you should see a new window appear. This will show all of the items in Outlook Express's Store Location. You should be looking at a window something like this one:

Outlook Express folders end with the three letters DBX. This tells you that it is an email folder. All of your emails are stored in these folders. You now need to copy these folders, and paste them to that folder you created at the start of the lesson.

• So, click the Edit menu at the top of the screen
• From the Edit menu, click Select All

• Click the Edit menu again
• This time, click Copy

When you click Copy, your Outlook Express email folders will be copied to the Windows Clipboard, ready to be pasted elsewhere.

Saving your Copied Outlook Express folders

To save your copied Outlook Express folders, you now need to locate the folder you created earlier. In the image below, we've navigated to the backupOEfolder. This was created on hard drive called F (this is a second hard drive on this PC. So if the first one goes down, we'll still have all of our Outlook Express email folders on a different drive.)

Double click your new folder to open it up. Then from the menu bar, click Edit > Paste. All of your Outlook Express email folders will then be pasted to your new folder. You can then burn them to CD for safe keeping. Or save then to another hard drive, like we did.

Of course, once you've backed up all your emails folder, you need to know how to restore them if anything goes wrong with your PC. We'll see how to do that in the next tutorial.