Email is one of the most used methods of communication in the professional world. To prevent losing essential personal and business data, it is crucial to backup your email.

The main goal of creating a backup of your email is to prevent or mitigate damage during data loss. Additionally, email backup speeds up the process of migrating to a different email account. It is also conducive during a ransomware attack if set up correctly.

But why do you need email backup? How can you set up a backup system for Outlook and Gmail? Let’s discuss.

Why Do You Need to Backup Your Emails?

As the active number of email users reaches nearly 4 billion, data safety becomes a rising concern. In America, a worker will receive 126 emails in a day on average. These emails contain highly valuable business information. If the organisation does not save these emails on a central server, the odds of losing access to the contents are very high. Even for personal emails, there are several reasons why you might lose your email account data. Viruses, software errors, human errors, power failures, hard drive crashes are some of the most common causes of losing personal data from email accounts.

But how do you know if you need to backup your emails? If you don’t have a backup system set up, think about all the data you have on your email. If you were to lose them right now, how severe would be the impact? Do you have an alternate method to retrieve them? If you could retrieve them, how long would it take for you to recover most or all of the data? Based on these answers, you can decide whether or not you need to backup your emails.

Advantages of Email Backup

• Email contents and their attachments can be restored fast and entirely with email backup.
• Speeds up the recovery time, therefore, reduces the downtime significantly in case of disaster.
• Speeds up the sorting process as you don’t have to spend hours getting rid of junk mails to free up your email space.
• For corporations, if employees leave or delete emails, they can still retrieve emails using the backup data.
• Keeps your email safe from disasters such as server failure or device breakdown.
• If you want to migrate to a different email account, you can use your backup to transfer your address book, emails, and documents quickly.
• During ransomware attacks, backups can help you recover your data even if the device is under attack.

How to Backup Outlook Emails?

If you are using Outlook for work, you are most likely using an IMAP or Exchange account. IMAP and Exchange servers automatically archive your email that you can access anytime or anywhere.

If you want to backup your Outlook emails locally, you can follow these steps:

1. Go to your Outlook account
2. Select the “file” option in the top-left corner
3. Select “open & export”
4. Click on the option marked as “import/export”
5. Choose the “export to a file” option and click Next
6. Select the “Outlook data file (.pst)” option and click Next
7. Select the mail folder you’d like to backup
8. Choose the location and name for your backup file and select Finish
9. To change the privacy of the files, enter and confirm a password. Then click on OK

How to Backup Gmail?

The Gmail backup process is a little different from other email hosting providers, as you can export your whole G Suite in one file. You can export all of your Gmail data unless you have deleted them. To backup your Gmail, you can follow these steps:

1. Click on the Google account icon
2. Locate the option “Manage your Google account” and click on it
3. Go to the “Data & personalization” tab
4. Scroll down to “Download or delete your data.” Click on the option “Download your data”
5. It will take you to the Google Takeout page. Under “Select data to include”, check the Mail to include it in your download. Then click “Next step”
6. To decide the data delivery location, click on the arrow below “Delivery method”
7. Choose the export frequency, file type, and maximum file size.
8. Click on “Create export” after specifying the options
9. The exporting process will start right away. The total exporting time depends on the file size

In addition to backing up your emails, you must focus on other email security measures as well. One of the most critical steps of securing your email account and keeping your data safe is to ensure your email address privacy. If spammers and hackers have access to your email address, they can run phishing attacks to gain access to your data. So, you need to make sure your email address does not exist anywhere on the web.

To check your email address visibility, go to Sniff Email — an online platform dedicated to finding out if your email address exists on the Internet. Enter your email address in the search field and click fetch to find out if your email address exists on the web within a few seconds. Based on the results, you can take appropriate action to remove it.