How To Save Your Emails To a Local Hard Drive
For easy archiving and security purposes
There are several reasons you might want to save your emails to your hard drive, includingrecovery after sudden data loss. Backing up your emails to an external hard drive will make sure you always have access to them, even if your account gets attacked by a hacker.
In this article, we will discuss how to back up emails from the top email clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
What Is An Email Client?
An email client is a program that enables users to compose, receive, send, access, and manage emails from multiple accounts in one place.
Users typically create folders and labels to organize emails so they can be searched for by details such as time, subjects, senders, and content.
Thunderbirdemail is a free application that is simple to set up and easily customizable for Windows, Mac and Linux.
It keeps all your preferences, messages, folders, and other information in a separate file than the Thunderbird program files. This file is calledyour profile directory. You need to use it to back up your emails.
Make sure Thunderbird is not running and open the profile directory. Where to find it depends upon the operating system you are using. Below we will show you how to locate your profile in Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Using Windows
Find Thunderbird Profile In Mac
Highlight all the files and folders in yourThunderbird profile. Now you can copy the email data to an external hard drive to create a backup. It’s a good idea, especially for very large email profiles, to compress the folders and files to a zip file. A zip file is compressed and takes up much less space.
Highlight all the folders, files, or zip file you created and copythe files. Navigate to the external hard drive where you want to save your emails and paste them in.
How To Save Your Gmail Emails To a Hard Drive
To learn more about .MBOX files, watchWhat To Do with Exported .MBOX Files.
Save Your Outlook Emails to an External Hard Drive
Microsoft Outlook (MSO) is a very popular email client. It works seamlessly on Windows and Mac operating systems,though it can impact memory usage. If you are running Linux and don’t know how to run Outlook, watchMicrosoft Office 365 on Linux.
To back up Outlook to an external hard drive, connect it to your computer now. If a dialog box appears, clickCancel.
Choose from the following options:
Click onBrowseand choose the external drive from the list of storage devices.
ClickNextand thenFinish. If you want to keep your messages secure, enter a password when prompted and clickOK.
It’s always a good idea to back up all your essential files on your computer, including your emails. If your computer crashes or gets hacked, you will always have a backup to access your important data.
Saving emails on an external hard drive is also the way to import them back to a new computer.
David has a background in small business and lives in Australia. He is a WordPress and Ubuntu Developer who enjoys design, CSS and tech tool integration.Read David’s Full Bio
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