How To Back Up Mail On Mac OS X: Free.

Mac360 preaches backup. Backup files, backup OS X, backup, backup, backup.

Free solutions or expensive solutions, find a way to backup. How about email? Backup for free.

You know the drill. You turn on your Mac and nothing happens. The hard drive is dead and every file on your Mac is gone.

It happens. Hard drives die. With that death, all your Mac’s files will head to to Byte Heaven, never to be seen again. Unless you backup.

Our Macs have many kinds of files and applications. From music files, to photos, to documents, to email. Ah, that’s right. Email.

Think about all the email that’s sitting on your Mac when your hard drive fries to a crispy critter glow in the dark paperweight. What’s next?

If you have a good backup routine in place, the worst that can happen is some annoyance and the expense of a new hard drive.

In between are the utilities you need to make sure your backup routine is worthy. Enter Email Backup. Backup your email files. For free.

That has a nice ring to it, right? The process is rather simple, so this is a case of “you get what you pay for.”

Email Backup is really easy backup, but not totally featureless.

For example, you can select which email application you want to backup. That list includes Apple’s Mail, Microsoft’s Entourage, Eudora, or Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

The second step is a simple one—select a backup destination. It’s best to make that a second hard drive, or an external hard drive, or even a CD to be burned for off site storage.

Third, select a time and day to do the backup. Yes, that means there’s a built in scheduler. Not bad for free, huh?

Select the time of day and the day of the week to backup. The click Save to save the configuration. That’s it.

When the correct time and day rolls around, Email Backup copies all the necessary files to the selected location, and you’re backed up.

Here’s why Email Backup is free. It’s simple. It works. But restore is purely manual so you need to know where the backed up files need to go to restore your email.

As soon as you do a few backups you start wanting a few more features.

Enter Email Backup Pro. It’s still simple, though you’ll need about $10 to get the extra goodies, which may well be what you need.

You can backup more than one email application. Mail, Entourage, Thunderbird, and more, or all at the same time. The scheduler is still there for time and day.

There’s also an option to keep more than one backup at a time. And the Pro version will restore automatically, and keep a log of all that took place. Is that worth $10? Probably, especially for those of us with many email accounts, and who use multiple email applications.

Regardless of which backup solution you choose, or if you choose multiple solutions, a backup will be well worth your effort when your hard drive awakens by pushing up daisies.

How prepared are you for a hard drive failure? What’s your email backup plan? Share with other readers in the Comments section below.