How to Backup Outlook Express Emails, Step by Step

There is nothing worse than losing access to your computer's hard drive; especially when you lose months, or even years of emails as well as your personal email contact lists. It's especially frustrating when you realize, after the fact of course, that this total loss could have been avoided with less than two minutes of work.

In a few steps I am going to explain how you can backup your outlook express emails and protect yourself from this unfortunate situation. While this process can seem a bit overwhelming at first, once you get the hang of it you can backup your Outlook Express emails and contacts at will in about one minute flat. This method of backing up your Outlook Express emails and contact list is safe; it will not harm your computer, but you must follow the steps to avoid getting confused.

Materials needed for this backup method

It's preferred that you have a secondary hard drive or an external hard drive to store your outlook email backup, though a floppy disk, CDR, DVDR or zip drive will work just as well. The important thing is that you are able to store the Outlook Express backup somewhere other than your main hard drive on your computer, because if your main hard drive fails with your backup on it, the email backup that you have created will be lost with it.

Before starting the backup process

Create a new folder on in your 'My Documents' folder. You can name it whatever you like, but I prefer to name my backup folders with the date; for instance, if today is June 24^th of 2007, I would name the folder 06.24.2007. This just helps me keep my backups in order. Again, the name of the folder doesn't matter; you can leave the name as 'New Folder' if you want.

Backing up the email contact list

Backing up your email contact list in outlook express is very straightforward. To backup your contact list, start by clicking on the 'Start' button, usually in the bottom left hand corner of your screen; give it a single mouse click. Once the Start Menu opens, scroll to the 'Outlook Express' option and click on that.

Once Outlook Express opens up, you will see the word 'File' in the upper left hand corner of Outlook Express. Single click on the word 'File'. The File menu will open up for you, and then you should scroll down to and hover over the option 'Export'. A new option pops out in the File menu, and you should hover over the option 'Address Book' and click on it.

Now on your screen you'll see what is called the 'Address Book Export Tool'. It will have a couple of options, but for simplicities sake you can just choose the 'Text File' option, and then hit the 'Export' button. Once you've pressed the export button, you're presented with an option where you can save the contact list.

The button is labeled 'Browse', and once you click on it you are presented with the contents of your 'My Documents' folder. Simply click on the backup folder that you created and enter a name in the 'File Name:' field like contacts or whatever you want to use, though contacts will work just fine. Once you've hit the 'Save' button, you are presented with a 'Next' button. Go ahead and click on that.

On the next screen you'll be presented with options on the fields that you want to save, such as name, address, phone number, etc. Go ahead and choose the fields you want to save by clicking in the boxes with your mouse. If a box has a checkmark, that means it's information that you want to be saved. Once you are done choosing the fields, click 'Finish'. You will then receive a notification that your backup is complete. Congratulations! You've just backed up your email contact list in Outlook Express.

Backing up your emails and folders in Outlook Express

This part of the backup process is a little trickier, but it becomes very easy once you've done it a few times.

Go ahead and open up a new 'My Documents' folder, this will keep things easy for you. This means that you should have two 'My Documents' folders open now. At the top of the My Documents folder you will see a toolbar; options include 'File', 'Edit', etc. Hover over and click on the 'Tools' option and then scroll down to 'Folder Options' and click on that.

A menu will pop up, and you are going to want to be on the 'View' tab. In with the checkboxes on the View tab are little circles called radio buttons, you want the dot to be in front of 'Show hidden files and folders', not the one that says 'Do not show hidden files and folders'. Once you have the dot in front of the right phrase, go ahead and click on the 'Apply' button, then press 'Ok'.

This part can get a little tricky, but I'll try and cover it in detail so that you can follow along. Right now you should be looking at your 'My Documents' folder. Underneath the file menu toolbar near the top of your My Documents folder you will see a 'back', 'forward' and 'up' button. Go ahead and press the up button, you should be able to see the files and folders that are on your computer's desktop. Go ahead and click on the 'My Computer' icon.

Once you've clicked on 'My Computer' you'll see something labeled something like 'Local Disk C:' or the very close to it. What you're looking for is your main hard drive. If you don't know what your main hard drive is, then it's likely Local Disk C. Go ahead and double click on your main hard drive.

Next, you'll want to double click on the 'Documents and Settings' folder. Once you've entered the Documents and Settings folder, you will either see a folder labeled 'Administrator' or one labeled with your computer login name. For me, it's 'dell' as that's the administrator name on my computer. For you it might be 'John' or 'Mary' or 'Bucks Machine'; it should be pretty easy to figure out. When you find the right folder, double click on it.

In this next folder you will see a transparent folder next to the name 'Local Settings', this is what you want to double click on. Once that is done, in the next folder you will see the words 'Application Data' next to another transparent folder; go ahead and double click on this folder as well.

Inside the 'Application Data' folder, you will see the 'Identities' folder; go ahead and double click on that. Finally - the easy part. You'll notice after clicking on the 'Identities' folder that you come to a folder with a weird name with letters, numbers and maybe symbols. From this point on, just double click on every folder you see until you some files, which there won't be any more folders to open at that point; once you've found the file or files then you've found what you were digging for.

These files are your emails and the folders that they are sorted into. To backup these emails, all you need to do is press the control button on your keyboard at the same time as the letter 'A'; this will highlight all the files in front of you. Once the files are highlighted, go ahead and press the control button again, but instead of 'A', press 'C'. So - 'Ctrl+A' to select the files, 'Ctrl+C' to copy the files, and it must be done in that order.

Be careful that you do not press 'Ctrl+X' as that will 'cut' the files from your Outlook Express folder, and that is not what you're looking to do. If you accidently press 'Ctrl+X', to reverse it, simply press 'Ctrl+Z' and that will undo the action.

We're almost there!

Be sure that you have your Outlook Express backup folder open, the one that you created in your 'My Documents' folder. You should have the backup folder you created as the top folder on your computer screen, and then press the Ctrl+V buttons. That's the control button plus the letter 'V'; this will paste the copied emails from your Outlook Express into your backup folder.

Right now you should have a complete backup of not only your emails, but a backup of your email contact list as well. However, we are not quite done yet; there is one thing needs to be fixed before we can move on.

If you have the folder open where you copied the Outlook Express emails from, this will work fine; otherwise go ahead and open up a new 'My Computer' folder. We are going to go back up to the 'Tools' menu option at the top of the folder, and choose 'Folder Options' again. Click on the 'View' tab, and look for the circle with the dot in it that we changed earlier. Be sure that the dot is now next to the 'Do not show hidden files and folders' option, then click 'Apply', then 'Ok'. While this part isn't really necessary, it helps to keep important computer files out of the easy reach of kids and keeps 'accidents' from happening with important folders and files.

That's it! That is all there is to backing up your emails and contact list with Outlook Express. However, now that you have your Outlook Express backed up, you need to move the backup to another hard drive or copy it onto a disk for maximum protection. I recommend either using an external hard drive or getting a CDRW (rewritable CD ROM) for Outlook Express backups, this way you can add to and remove previous backups easily.

As I mentioned before, this method may seem a little overwhelming at first, but once you've done it a few times it literally can take you under a minute to backup Outlook Express; and that minute you take to back things up may very well end up saving your years of emails and your extensive email contact list.