Do you use Microsoft Outlook to manage your emails, contracts and diary for your business?  If you do, you really should be making a regular backup of everything that its storing for you. 

We see many people each week that have use Outlook to essentially run their business.  They keep all their vital business contacts details, meeting diary and emails within Outlook but in the majority of cases, they’ve never created a backup.  This is a really bad idea as any number of things can happen that will cause you to lose all your vital data!

It’s a very simple process to create a backup file and in most cases can be completed within 5 minutes or so.

Why not follow our step by step guide and save yourself a headache in the future.

1: Any backup files created from any program should be saved on a different drive, so look out either a pen drive, external had drive or a blank dvd to copy the file(s) to.

2: Open Microsoft Outlook, click “File” then go to “Import & Export”.

3: You will now be presented with a new window, choose “Export to a file” and click next.

4: Now choose “Personal Folder File (.pst) and click next.

5: Choose which folders you want to backup, in most cases this will involve clicking on “Personal Folders” and checking the “Include subfolders” box.  This will save all folders under the personal folders to one file.  Click next.

6: Click browse and navigate to where you want to create the backup file, click “ok” and then click “Finish”.  Outlook will now create a backup PST file to your chosen location.  This file should contain all your contacts, calendar entries and emails which can now be kept somewhere safe.  Ideally this should be done on a regular basis so if the worst does happen, you won’t lose months worth of work.