Ways to back up OE's e-mail messages

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): One of the questions I frequently receive from readers of this column is how we can transfer all the e-mail messages in Outlook Express' existing Inbox and other folders to a new computer.

We may have acquired a brand new PC, or we may be thinking of reformatting our super-cluttered hard disk but do not want to lose all the thousands of e-mail messages in our OE.

I have personally suggested to some of the readers to copy all the files in OE's Store folder and then import them all into the new OE. I also realize that, most of the time, it is not really practical.

First, we may have dozens of folders, each of which may contain hundreds to thousands of messages, and therefore the folders can be very huge. My Inbox.dbx file, for example, is 275 MB in size. It would require around 200 floppy diskettes just to create a backup copy of this file.

I must admit that I have not found any other easier way to create a copy of all the e-mail messages, store them in a safe place or transfer them to another computer and then import them back into OE. There are a couple of ways that we still can do this, but they are roundabouts because Microsoft does not provide us with the straightforward way to back up the messages in OE.

First, as the use of diskettes is completely out of the question, we may need a removable mass storage, such as the 2 MB Jazz drive from Iomega, the 2.2 GB ORB drive from Castlewood and any of the backup tape drives that have been available on the market for many years. An easier and cheaper solution will be to just connect our PC to another one using two standard Ethernet network interface cards (NICs) and transfer the files over the peer-to-peer network.

Or, if you happen to have the old LapLink cable, you can also use it to transfer the files to the other PC, although the limited transfer speed will make it a very lengthy operation.

Certainly, a CD-RW, which can store up to 650 MB of data, is another handy solution. If your existing PC has a CD-RW, just copy all the contents of the Store folder to a rewrittable CD and then restore them from this media. The most complicated way to backup the folder is to open the PC's housing, attach a second hard disk to the system and then copy the files in Store folder to a temporary folder on the backup hard disk.

This, however, may not work if you use a different make of hard drive as the slave hard disk.

If you only have one PC, and you do not have any of the removable storage devices, you can still save a backup copy of the Store folder on the same hard disk and reformat the boot drive. The condition is that you have a large enough hard disk to create a separate logical drive on the same physical drive.

You will need a utility such as PowerQuest's PartitionMagic, which will help you create a new partition without destroying what you already have on the hard disk. Suppose your boot drive is C: and your new logical drive is D:, you can store the e-mail backup on drive D: and then reformat C: to restore your system speed.

If you have an always-on, broadband Internet connection, you can also consider subscribing to Web-based storage services such as I-Drive and Xdrive. Copy the entire folder to Xdrive, and then import it into the newly installed OE right from the Web site.

Incidentally, if you forget how to get to your OE's Store folder, just click on the Tools menu. Click on Options, and then on the Maintenance tab on the dialog box that appears. Click on Store folder, and you will see the path to the folder where your OE saves all the files of your e-mail messages.

Tips

While browsing the Internet to find a better way to backup the e-mail messages, I came across some interesting and useful tips in using OE. For example, we can copy an individual OE message into a floppy diskette or any other removable media by opening Windows Explorer (remember, it is Windows Explorer, not Internet Explorer) and dragging the message from OE's folder list right on to the 3 1/2 Floppy (A) on the left pane of Windows Explorer.

And this is an easy way to copy individual messages. As you should also realize, not all the e-mail messages in our OE are actually worth keeping. As you change your PC or reformat its hard disk, it can be an ideal time to clean up the mess by selecting only the most important and indispensable messages into the backup media.

Later on, when the new Outlook Express has been installed, or when the media is already available in the new PC, we can simply use Windows Explorer to list all of the messages and then drag and drop them from the removable media into an open OE. This will do the trick.

A small modification to this trick is to create a dedicated folder for all the e-mail messages that you really want to preserve. You can copy selected messages using OE's Find facility, and then copy them to the dedicated folder. Then, in OE, you can go to this folder, select all these messages and copy them in one clean swoop into the removable medium.

Incidentally, if you want to extract all the e-mail addresses in your OE, you can download Address Extractor, a US$12.95 utility, from CNet's Download.com site. The utility can collect all the e-mail addresses in each of your OE's folder and save it in a text file that you can later import into OE's Address Book.

Now, if you happen to have a better solution to backup all the e-mail messages in OE and then restore them later, we will appreciate it very much if you are willing to share it with us. A lot of my readers as well as myself are still faced with this challenge. (zatni@cbn.net.id)