Well, for those who use an email client and loosing their emails is one of the worst nightmares. Unfortunately this situation is quite probable.
There are several causes for this:
-Hard disk failure
-Viruses and Trojans
-Windows crashes
-Some time un-expected things
Hard Disk can fail from several reasons: logical problems like bad partitions, hardware problems caused by dropping them or something on them, or, sometimes they just stop functioning. You can use several data recovery tools like GetDataBack or Acronis, which might save your day. But you might not be able to get back any byte.
Viruses are increasing their numbers day by day. It's hard to keep up even for the big players like Symantec or Kaspersky. They reduced the response time for a new virus, but if you are unlucky, the virus crashes your computer before you can apply the antivirus.
Well, we all know how reliable Windows is. There is no person that can say he never saw a "blue screen". Because most of the email clients store email, account and settings data in My documents, Program files or in Windows registry. When you reinstall the operating system you loose them all. Even Microsoft CEO Bill Gates acknowledged that they counted 5 percent of total Windows based computers to crash twice every day. A small report can be found on the NY Times website.
The best way to count those situations is to backup emails on a CD or another hard disk. People who know a little about Windows and computers can do it by hand. Outlook Express is still the most used email client.
If you want to backup Outlook Express by hand, you have to save registry keys and DBX files. Saving messages, signatures and the address book can be done within the email client, but for settings you have to search through Windows registry. It can be pretty difficult to do it for a beginner.
After a long search now I found a tool that can do this job automatically. You can use this software to backup Outlook Express, IncrediMail and some other email clients. It's an email saver program that can backup and restore emails, addresses, folders, signatures and options.
What it cannot do is backing up Outlook Express and restoring to Pegasus Mail for instance. Synchronization can take place between different instances of the same email client.
It can be used to move emails from one computer to another. For instance if you own a laptop and a PC, you can transfer emails between them. Furthermore, you can backup Outlook Express from Windows98 and restore it to Windows XP.
It's pretty clear that anyone can loose emails. So backing up your email client is essential, but you have to decide whether to do it by hand or to purchase a tool.
