I recently lost my hard drive and am now going through the painful process of data recovery. While I have been waiting (with fingers and toes crossed) for my data to be retrieved, I started exploring the avenues for backing up going forward. I found the following we site: http://www.iopus.com/guides/oe-backup.htm. It's entitled: "How to backup Outlook Express (OE) Email and transfer settings to another PC." It shows you how to save the files, the address books, the settings, and the message rules. It also shows you the location of the files which are embedded deeply in a c:\ drive subdirectory. Now I don't know if this will help with another operating system and I haven't tried it myself yet. However, it did flow well and seemed to have easy-to-follow steps. Good luck finding what you need! If anyone has a low-cost, reputable data recovery service to recommend, I'd be all ears. Please respond off-list! Sorry for not sticking strictly to Sussex County issues, but just to add...my Sussex County surnames are: Nestor, Berrigan, Oliver. I have several in Orange County, NY too. My web site is: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~nestorgenealogy/. Gail Rich Nestor Smyrna, GA ----- Original Message ----- From: "R_J_S" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 9:19 PM Subject: Re: [NJSUSSEX-L] Question re Archiving Emails > To Helen and those interested, > > I just went through this exercise back in October after I purchased a new > computer when my old one was dying. > > I tried to export my Outlook Express files onto the new computer, but that > did not work - different versions of OE and I could not make it work. I > took that to mean that if I saved the files (in the .dbx format used by > Outlook Express) to a CD or transferred them to an external drive, that I > would not be able to use the files. > > Outlook Express has an "Export" feature which will export messages from > Express to Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Exchange. I didn't have either > program, so I didn't use that option. I had hoped to find a utility to > convert all the files to a text file with few commands, but was > unsuccessful. > > I finally did what you don't want to do -- I went through the messages one > at a time and saved them as text files in a directory structure that was > the same as my Outlook Express folder structure. I probably had upwards > of 4000 messages in my whole system. I opened each email, then went to > <File> <Save As> and clicked Text (when given the choice) and typed in a > unique file name for each file. I also saved all of the attachments. It > is a tedious and arduous process, but at least I have my correspondence > (and attached files!) for the past six years in a text format that I can > transfer to any other computer system in the future. > > While doing this, I used file names that identified the correspondent and > the date sent (e.g., Helen-20050403.txt) and my response might be > (Helen-RS-20050404.txt). Or you could use a sequential number to identify > separate emails (e.g., Helen-01-20050403.txt). You could save them also > as separate Outlook Express files with an .eml extension - they will open > in Outlook Express, assuming your current version of OE is compatible with > the file created earlier. I considered the idea of transferring all of > them from and to a correspondent into an MSWord document, but I would have > had to type the email date and subject for each one. > > Having done all that, I then backed all of the message files up on a CD > stored away from home and on my expternal hard drive at home. > > There may be an easier way to accomplish this, and I would appreciate any > suggestions to make it easier to do it. My method was "brute force and > awkwardness" but I at least have my data in usable files for the > foreseeable future. > > Cheers -- Randy > Researching KNAPP and AUBLE in NJ Sussex County. >