If the user owns a business, he must already know how important the Microsoft Outlook emails are. They’re how the user communicates with the clients and might also get the projects. So make sure to backup your Outlook emails to never lose important information and always keep access to the important mailbox data. Apart from business purposes, email messages are important too for personal usage with friends, for school, or with family members.
Many individuals never think to backup mail Outlook, their important mailbox database and apparently lose their complete data which becomes difficult or impossible to retrieve the lost data.
So, this tutorial is for the users to learn about how to backup your Outlook emails effectively without any risk of data loss. We will provide the complete methods to save all emails from Outlook to PC, hard drive, or different file formats with all the mailbox items including contact information, etc.
Let’s first understand some reasons to export Outlook emails to other platforms.
Reasons to Backup Your Outlook Emails
You might not think at the part of backing up your important Outlook email messages and other mailbox items. What if one day you lose all the access to your important mailbox database? You will definitely don’t want that to happen to you.
Commonly, users lose access to their email accounts when they forgot their passwords. Surely, there are steps available to regain access to your emails, however, these steps may be time-consuming.
Another reason to lose access to your mailbox might be hacking. Once your Outlook account got hacked, it becomes quite difficult for you to regain access. If this situation occurs and you have the Outlook data backup file with you then at least you have the access to your email data.
Methods to Backup Your Outlook Emails
Here we will describe the methods available to backup Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010, 2007 emails. Follow the steps provided with each method.
Method 1: Drag & Drop Emails to File Explorer Folders
An easy and quick way to back up a single mail message is to simply drag it from the Outlook inbox and drop it into a file explorer folder.
- Launch the Outlook program and select the email you want to backup.
- Then open the File explorer folder to save the backed-up message.
- Now drag the email message and drop it to the file explorer folder to create a backup.
Method 2: Use IMAP or Exchange to Backup Your Outlook Emails
MS Exchange is an email system while IMAP is a mail protocol. Basically, both IMAP and MS Exchange have a centralized server on the cloud or within the enterprise. This server generally contains everything about your emails or other mailbox items. Users need to log in to the server in order to view or access the email messages.
Users don’t need to back up their emails locally in these cases as all the emails are already backed up on the server. If you need a local backup of your emails then you need to talk to the IT team to have a copy of your archive. Of course, this can be a hassle for users.
Method 3: Forward/ Export Outlook Emails to Another Email Client
Users can even backup outlook 2016, 2013, 2010 email messages to another email client application. Moreover, it’s a time-consuming process, and users can forward only a single email at a time. An advantage of this method is that the attachments will also be forwarded with the email message.
- Sign in to your Outlook profile.
- Open the email message you want to backup.
- Click on the Forward icon from the menu.
- Enter the email addresses where you want to send the email as a backup.
Method 4: Use Auto Archiving
Outlook offers an automatic archiving feature that enables to archive the emails that are older than a certain period of time. The email messages will automatically get stored in the backup archive location after time passes.
In order to do this, users need an archiving location to be available at all times. When you enable the archiving of your Outlook emails, a PST (Personal Storage Table) file will be created that will add over time.
- Open your Outlook program.
- Click on the File tab.
- Go to the options and then click on the advanced.
- Press Auto Archive and click on the Auto archive settings.
Here you can select how often you want the archival system to run and choose other settings such as deleting the old messages, etc. as per your convenience.
Method 5: Using Advanced PST File Converter
To backup your Outlook emails, we have seen the manual approaches above. However, we have also noticed that some methods have a risk of data loss, some are complex and time-consuming processes, and several other limitations. You can opt for an advanced third-party professional utility that avoids all of these limitations and provides a smooth conversion. One such solution is offered by Data Recovery Solutions i.e, DRS Outlook PST File Converter that allows to export Outlook PST files to EML, MBOX, HTML, PDF, MSG, TXT, CSV, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Thunderbird, IMAP, Office 365, etc. including all the mailbox items such as emails, attachments, contacts, calendars, etc. Batch conversion of the Outlook emails can easily be performed without any difficulties. It doesn’t require the installation of the MS Outlook application. Even a novice user can easily run the software as it is designed on a smooth user-friendly interface that doesn’t require any technical expertise by the user. The free Outlook PST File Converter version is also available that allows to save 50 emails for free to evaluate the performance of the software.
