Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Back Up and Restore Your Email
Are your email messages valuable to you? I know mine are. I've spent years saving
them, and they're the only record I have of certain kinds of information. So you'd bet-
ter believe I back up my email along with the rest of my files, and I recommend that
you do, too. See my topic Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac for guidance.
If you use Time Machine to back up your Mac, you have the advantage of being able to
restore individual messages in Mail—just click the Time Machine Dock icon while Mail
is the frontmost app, navigate back to a time when your message was there, select
the message, and click Restore. Other backup systems make it more challenging to
find individual messages to restore, but even restoring your entire Mail archive from
an earlier time is better than losing a crucial message.
Whichever backup software you use, make sure it backs up all the following items
(Time Machine does so by default):
~/Library/Mail : This folder contains all your mailboxes, rules, junk mail
settings, and most of the other data Mail uses.
~/Library/Keychains : This folder contains all your keychains, which
store your usernames and passwords.
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook : This folder contains
your Contacts entries and your Previous Recipients list.
~/Library/Preferences :
This
folder
contains
your
preference
files,
among which is the one Mail uses.
If your iOS device is set up to use either iCloud or iTunes for automatic backups, those
will include your email too, but beware—that works only for messages already down-
loaded to your device, not all the messages from a server-based account.
It's also possible to use an app or cloud service to back up messages from your
email provider to either your Mac or a cloud-based service. Examples of Mac apps
include BackupGoo , Gmail Backup , Gmvault Gmail Backup , and Horcrux ; services in-
clude Backupify for Google Apps , Dropmyemail , and Spinbackup . I have no experience
with any of these, so be sure to study the fine print to see if one of them will meet
your needs. And remember: if you're backing up your email to your Mac, you'll also
need to back up those backups to another location!
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