Email is now absolutely critical to any business, so much so, it’s hard to imagine being without it. More than any other means of communication, companies rely on emails. In this day in age, it’s safe to say, a company could not survive without emails. Because of this, email recovery has become an increasingly needed service.

Email can be placed into two categories – online and offline. A few examples of online email would be Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. This type of email is accessed through a web browser and is stored online. Although seemingly safe, there is no guarantee one these companies won’t lose your emails. Offline email, on the other hand, is accessed using software like Microsoft Outlook. These programmes connect to an email exchange server, and if you’ve set it up to do so, store your emails on your hard disk. The one disadvantage of offline email is that your emails are only stored on the machine with the software on, and if it breaks or the hard drive fails, your emails will be lost. Fortunately, email stored on local disks is easy to back up.

Backing up in Outlook Express is simple; just find the folder where the software stores the email files, and copy them to an external hard drive or USB thumb drive. If you back up periodically anyway, these files will be included automatically regardless. Normally, the folders containing email files are hidden, so you won't be able to see it in Windows Explorer. Go to Folder Options in the Control Panel and on the View tab select ‘Show hidden files, folders and drives’. You can then access the mail folders in Explorer and copy them elsewhere to back them up.