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Backing up your AOL Mail

You should protect your AOL Mail. In this Computing Guide Kai Chandler shows you how

If there’s one thing we at Practical PC bang on about, it’s the need to keep a backup of your data so you can restore it when the worst happens.

One of our top tips is to store your important files together in a special folder, let’s call it Data, so that you can back that up to tape, floppy disk, a removable drive or more commonly these days, a CD writer or rewriter. There’s really not much need to back up your application files as you can always reload the original programs from CD or diskette. For example, my Data folder has subfolders for documents, Quicken data files, family tree and so on.

One set of data that’s often overlooked is your email history – that’s everything that you’ve sent or received in AOL.

If you are not sure how to see this history, then now’s the time to find out. It’s in AOL’s Personal Filing Cabinet or PFC. You don’t need to be connected to view it. Just start AOL and select Personal Filing Cabinet from the <File> menu. There are three folders under Email: Incoming/Saved Email, Email Waiting to be Sent and Email you’ve sent. You can also add your own folders, for example, to store business correspondence you’ve received.

Preferences- some background to the PFC

The PFC has a number of preference settings – to view these, open the Personal Filing Cabinet, select the <Manage PFC> option, then the <Backup> option and finally <Prefs> – short for Preferences.

Here you can select how often AOL should create its own backup of the PFC – the default is four weeks but you can set it to a lower value, say daily. The two options at the bottom of the preferences screen ensure that any mail you send or receive is kept safely.

Whether you select the option to backup your PFC or whether it happens as part of the automatic backup, it will create a backup file in the backup directory of AOL.  Note that this is only for the current screen name.

How to be in control of your Personal Filing Cabinet

To be sure the files are placed where they’ll be protected by your regular backup routine you need to copy AOL’s Organize subdirectory to your Data directory – ready to be saved to CD or other medium when you backup the rest of your valuable data files.

Here’s how to do it using Windows Explorer.

·          First start Windows Explorer. A quick way to do this is to right click on the Start icon and then select Explore.

·          Scroll down the list of folders until you see the Program Files folder.

·          Select the + sign adjacent to Program Files to expand the folder.

·          Repeat on the + sign next to AOL7.0.

·          Select the Organize folder.

·          Press Control-C to copy the contents to your computer’s copy and paste buffer.

·          Now scroll up until you find your Data folder (you may need to create it if it doesn’t exist.)  Select the Data folder.

·          Press Control-V to paste the Organize folder into Data. This will create a new Organize folder if there is not already one there.  

You should do this before you backup.

How to restore your PFC

If you ever need to restore your PFC, perhaps after a disk failure, then you may first need to restore the Data folder and subfolders from the CD.  Then simply copy the Organize folder from Data back into your AOL Organize folder to overwrite whatever is there.

Bingo! All your emails will be restored back to the time you copied the Organize folder although note that you will have deleted anything created there since you copied the folder to Data.

You can apply the same principle to protect the content of your AOL download folder.