e-skills UK Guide

Email storage

Keeping emails secure with backups

If you have not used email before you will very quickly find it becomes part of your every day business life. For many small businesses over 90% of external communications are conducted over email as it is a convenient and easy to use tool.

One useful feature of email is the ability to save your messages and file them away for later reference. Some email programs have advanced filtering and sorting tools to enable you to file emails away and retrieve them by searching for key words or maybe a sender’s name.

The downside of this is that your emails will become indispensable, and unless you find a way of backing up these messages any data loss could cause your business a real problem.

Managing messages should not take much time or cost much money. A backup may only take a few minutes, and if you back up data to a memory device or CD/DVD the cost is very small. We cover general backups in more detail in the Backing up data Guide.

Typical email problems

At some point you may experience one or more of the following email related problems:

• Lack of hard disk space.
• Inability to search for emails as your email database grows. 
• Problems trying to back up email data. 
• Problems trying to retrieve archived data.

Unless you do something about it, your email in-box and sent mail folder will continue to gather more and more data as you send and receive messages. Eventually you will get to the point where you are unable to find previous emails because they are obscured by all the data in your system.

You might also encounter:

• Restrictions imposed on the size of your email database by the administrator of your system. Some providers enable you to pay more money for an increase in storage space.
• Restrictions on the size of your email storage imposed by your software.
• Instability – the risk of your email program crashing (and the impact if it does) increases with the amount of email data you have. 

Preventing problems with email

There are four ways of preventing the main problems of email:

• Do not keep anything online. If you print all your emails and file them you might have little use for     keeping emails online. In practice, most people find it useful to keep messages for a while so they can look them up easily.
• Keep messages and attachments. Attachments can occupy a very large amount of space on disk so, although this scheme is attractive, it uses the maximum amount of space.
• Keep messages only. In this scheme, people save attachments to disk - where they are subject to their own backup and archiving scheme. Attachments can then be deleted from the messages significantly reducing the space required for your email.
• Keep recent messages and attachments online but archive the rest to disk. This scheme takes the most time to manage but often presents the best balance between the need to keep emails ‘just in case’ and the need to keep the size of your email file down.

In any case, you should delete unwanted email straight away. Note that most email programs do not actually delete your emails. Instead they are sent to a ‘deleted’ folder so you can get them back if you change your mind. You therefore need to regularly clear out your ‘deleted’ folder. Most email programs allow you to clear it out automatically when you close the program down. Some email programs (including Microsoft Outlook) provide an auto-archive facility which moves old emails into an archive for you.

Managing email folders

Most email programs allow you to create folders to contain both sent and received messages. Take some time to come up with a folder scheme that will help you find emails when you need them. For example, you might organise emails by:

• Clients or customers
• Products
• Projects

Then get into the habit of moving received and sent messages into the relevant folder.

To help you, some email programs allow you to create rules that automatically move emails into folders based on rules you provide. This can also be a useful way to remove clutter from your inbox.

Email backups

If you use PC-based email, your messages are held on your PC. You need to be sure it is being backed up or you stand to lose the lot as the result of a single fault. The way in which you backup your data will vary from vendor to vendor, so it is best to look at specific instructions that apply to your installation.

Web based email, for example that provided by Microsoft Hotmail or Google’s Gmail, will be managed by the supplier’s own staff. Generally these email stores are very secure as they are fully backed up and managed remotely, often in a different country.

Backups of your PC should be part of your regular data management program. Here are some other Guides that explain the backup of data in more detail - Protecting important data, Securing computer data and Controlling access to data.

Third party email management tools

There are a number of third party tools available to help you backup and manage your email data. Often these can backup your data far quicker than using the tools available from the email supplier. These tools range in price from £10 per client through to about £30 per client and can be installed in a few minutes.

ARGENTUMA

ADOLIX

BACKUP-EMAIL 

Commercial suppliers

We do not recommend specific products or suppliers; instead we provide you with a representative sample which covers the range of suppliers/products available. You may choose to look at these suppliers or products but this is entirely at your discretion.