Why backup email?

    How would you or your business be affected if you suddenly lost all your email messages, contacts and attachments? Imagine, for just a movement how your life would change if you turn on your computer tomorrow and the hard drive that had ran flawlessly for three years - quit. Thousands of businesses lose millions of dollars worth of information to fire, power outage, theft, equipment failure, and even simple operator mistakes. Studies show that over half Internet users have lost computer files at some point and two thirds of them never recouvered their data. Most people can't or don't want to even imagine that happening, but sooner or later it will happen!

    Accidents do happen too, buildings burn, floods rise, lightning strikes, tornadoes, thefts to mention a few. Humans make mistakes! Willful data destruction, either by disgruntled workers or unknown vandals, is a fact of life that requires high levels of security and rigorous backup procedures. Hackers can destroy or corrupt data with unauthorized access to a computer system or by passing computer viruses.

    The inadvertent deletion of data by authorized users is the most common reason for data loss. Human error accounts for an estimated 90% of all data loss or corruption. Because of the high prevalence of these incidents, a good backup system is measured by the convenience of restoration and speed of retrieval, normally with single files.

    Of course you could protect your emails by looking over your hard drive, find the important files and manually copy them to another location, but this takes time and can be a challenge, since email programs hide their email databases somewhere deep inside the program folders or obscure windows settings. The downside to this approach is that it is tedious and inefficient. You're unlikely to do this every day, or even every week, so what is the use of a backup when it's several weeks old? You will need either an normal backup solution which can be quite expensive ( as most providers ask for monthly fees ) or a tiny reliable utility to save and restore just your email data.