Backing Up

I'm in the process of switching from a commercial backup service to an external hard drive that I bought a while back. Its purely a financial decision -- I'd rather spend the money that currently goes to the backup to rent movies from NetFlix. I know, first time the house burns down and I have no files at all, I'll feel pretty sheepish. Once the shock wears off, that is.

Actually, thats an interesting question that I don't dwell on. If you had to boogie from your house RIGHT NOW -- what would you take? The massive file cabinet? The MyBook hard drive? Whats irreplacable?

But anyway, I needed to know where Outlook Express stores its emails. As you may know, Outlook Express just LOVES to store files in folders that it may or may not identify to you. My email id is CeruleanBill, but the folder name in Outlook's folders might be a string of hex characters. And every time you create a new idea, or futz with Outlook, it does this again. I'd like to assume that the reason was because they never thought a user would need to know.... and not just to tick me off.

So when I found this, on the LIUtilities site, I was pleased:

Locating the Email Storage Folder
The easiest way to find out exactly where your emails are stored is to start Outlook Express, go to the Tools menu, and open the Options dialog box. In the Options dialog box, select the Maintenance page and click the Store Folder button. Here you can find the path to the folder containing your emails. To open the folder, copy the path and paste in the address field of the Windows File Manager. You should see a number of .dbx files and possibly some other files, too.

Neat.