IT Spot

Email, for many of us, is very
important and accumulates forever, making it a large mess when it comes
to backing it up.

The importance of my
email snuck on me. Once upon a time, I opened my old
reliable email program and was confronted with an
error message. The net effect of the problem was that the last
four days of incoming mail had disappeared from my inbox. This was, for
me, a very big deal. In large part, my inbox is my To Do list. As a
consultant, my incoming email is too important to ever allow a repeat
of this problem.

Suffice it say, this made me
think about backing up my email perhaps more than most people.

The need for reliable and redundant email backups dictates the use of a
client side email program such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird or Eudora. Web based email systems such as Gmail, Yahoo mail and
Hotmail, have their advantages but backup is not one of them.

To begin with, I
have an external hard disk attached to my computer and every morning I
copy all of my email from the internal hard disk to the external one.
This is a destructive backup. That is, every morning the backup is
totally re-created on the external hard disk. The advantage of
this is that I never have to worry about running out of space on the
external hard disk. The dis-advantage is that I can’t use it to recover
email from three days ago. Everything is a trade-off when it comes to
backups.

Also, this backup doesn’t manipulate the
original files in any way; they aren’t combined, compressed or
re-formatted. Thus, I can easily copy email from the external hard disk
back to my computer and use it immediately. And simple means there is
less to go wrong. The downside is that the backup is the same size as
the original, but external hard disks have a huge capacity and
tranferring files over a USB2 connection is more than fast enough for
this purpose.

One of my prime rules for backups is
to never to copy a file while it’s
in use. That is, I never copy email when my email
program is running and never copy Word documents when Word is
running. The morning backup of my email is scheduled
by the Windows scheduler and since it runs first thing after Windows
starts up my email program is not running.

This
however, is just a starting point as it still allows for the loss of an
entire day’s worth of email. To cut my potential loss in half, I also
backup my email mid-day. This backup is also scheduled
using the Windows scheduler,  but it’s very
different from the morning backup. Rather than backing up all my email,
here I only copy the most important folders (the inbox
and a few others). Also, the backup is sent via FTP to an
online file storage company.

This limits my worst case scenario to the loss of a half days worth
of email. It also means that no matter what happens to my computer and
the external hard disk, I always have the most important email stored a
thousand miles away. And since my email is sensitive, online
storage space is limited and uploads are slow, I
compress, encrypt and password protect
the email before it leaves my computer and travels
over the Internet to the file storage company.

The
mid-day backup is different in other ways too. For one, all
the email is combined into a single file. In addition, I keep multiple
copies of the mid-day backup. The backup program tags the daily file
with the current day of the week. Thus every backup made on a Monday
will result in the same file name. When the backup is sent offsite, the
backup program is instructed to delete older versions of files with the
same names. I end up with seven off-site copies of my most
important folders and, again, don’t have to worry about running out of
space.

Finally, once a month I compress and
encrypt all my email and send it off-site to another file storage
company.

No one approach is right for
everyone. For example, I have chosen to limit my worst-case loss to a
half day of email which may not work for you.
And my approach requires constantly filing email in
folders, something not everyone wants to do.

After
living with the above scheme for a while, I modified it a bit to
prevent the most important folders from growing in size forever.

I manually archive the inbox, sent folder and a few other important
folders by moving old messages to new folders tagged with the year. For
example, all the messages in my inbox from 2005 are stored in a folder called inbox2005. Likewise there
are folders called inbox2004, inbox2006 and inbox2007. A couple months ago
I moved messages in my inbox from January through March of this year into
the inbox2007 folder. Later this year, I’ll again move old
messages from this year into it.

With this
approach, I can eventually delete the inbox2004 and inbox 2005
folders from my computer. They remain on the external hard
disk and are also stored off-site if need be. Without some type of
archiving scheme, email will grow forever. I find that manipulating a
few folders this way a couple times a year is well worth
the effort.
 
Of course, you can’t use
this approach, or anything remotely similar, unless your email program
stores each folder as a separate file (or two). But who would use an
email program that stored all your mail in a single file?