How to Back Up Your Emails with the Cloud
Cloud services are becoming more and more common for business and personal use. If you have not yet moved over to the benefits of cloud computing it may be time to do so. Storing everything locally on your hide drive is all well and good but what happens when something goes wrong? Most people use some cloud services without even realising it. If you have an email account with Google or Microsoft, for instance, the data is held on remote servers that you access via the internet.
However, backing up cloud services is something that some people worry about. Cloud email accounts are hacked into from time to time, so where does that leave you if you can no longer access your address book, sent items or inbox? Even the most reliable internet email services have down time which means that you cannot access your account. And this always seems to happen at a crucial time.
Copying your email account details from one service to another means that you should be able to email whenever you need to, without worrying about whether the server that holds your details on is down for maintenance. It has the additional benefit of providing you with some security, should someone hack into your account. And a backup service means that, if you make a mistake and delete a crucial contact or an email, all is not lost and you can recover it.
If you use a cloud email service and want to back it up to another one a good place to start is with trueswitch.com. Rather than exporting your address book and inbox, which can be time consuming, you simply enter your new email account details. TrueSwitch will subsequently copy your emails, address book, calendar events and favourites, sometimes also called bookmarks, to the new service. So, for instance, you can replicate your Gmail account in Hotmail or vice versa. The process takes only 24 hours. If you are planning on only using your new email address TrueSwitch will send a notification from your old account to everyone in your address book saying it is now closed.
If you need to process more regular back ups of your email account, because you intend to keep using it in the future, then a good cloud service that will perform this for you is Backupify. The service is designed to be a one stop shop for backing up your cloud life. Not only will it provide a fall back measure for your email account, it stores copy of your other online services including Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. The service is free but offers limited space. For unlimited storage there is a monthly subscription fee.
In addition, Gmail and Yahoo Mail users should check out cloudally.com. For a fee, your email account will be backed up automatically, with no need to remember to do it yourself. The cloud back up system put together by CloudAlly runs every single day so your recovery copy is always up to date. CloudAlley says that its service is available to recover from 365 days a year, should the worst happen to your email account, with no down time.
