Is there a way to automatically backup email from my university IMAP EWS account Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Contacts database, etc. to a local folder?
I’m leaving the university soon, and could lose access to the online email account at any time, and would like to keep a local backup of all the data in that account. Or am I missing something and there’s a setting to force eM Client to download all message contents (not just headers) from the server and keep them up to date? (at the moment, whenever I click an email, it “loads”, indicating it’s downloading the message contents).
It may be that this is something like Automatic Archiving, except for all messages, rather than just older ones, and it makes a copy, rather than moving emails to local archive.
Easiest method is to copy or move the messages to Local Folders. These folders exist only on your computer, so are not synced with any server. If Local Folders are not visible, you can enable them in Menu > Tools > Settings > General > Show Local Folders.
Once you have everything copied or moved, you can safely remove the Exchange account.
Thank you for the reply! I currently do the exact procedure you describe, but there’s no easy way to update the manual backup. e.g. To add new emails manually to the backup Inbox folder, I need to either 1) delete the backup Inbox and recopy the whole folder, which takes ages, or 2) manually filter through hundreds of new emails and copy those over from the last one backed up (again, takes ages).
Guessing it’s not implemented. It sure would be nice to have a way of incrementally backing up email folders to Local Folders.
In other news, I found a checkbox on my IMAP accounts’ settings to “download messages for offline use”, but that option does not exist for EWS accounts (at least, not in v7 afaik). Still worried that the EWS account might be leaving stuff “online-only”, until the data is requested. Do you know if this is the case?
Automatic Archiving can do something like this but it is not a backup. It moves messages from the server to Local Folders based on their age. So you can set it to run every x days, and move messages older than y days to your Local Folders.
If you are concerned that the Exchange account is going to be closed, best bet is to manually move the messages to Local Folders now. Once the account is disabled, you will no longer have access to those messages on the server.
Thank you for the advice! Will do. Guess it’s as I feared. Here’s hoping that eM Client eventually implements auto-backup for all accounts to local folders.
eM Client has an automatic backup, which makes a copy of the database to a zip file. This will include all Local, IMAP and Exchange folders. The caveat is that if you don’t have the offline option enabled, the backup will only contain the message headers. That is absolutely useless if the messages have since been removed from the server, or the server account deleted.
The other issue with IMAP and Exchange is that if you restore the backup, immediately the server will delete anything from the backup that it does not have itself. So take an example where your server accidentally crashes and the whole mailbox is lost. Suddenly your eM Client Inbox is empty. No biggie because you have a backup from last week. So you restore that and immediately all those messages are again deleted because the sever takes priority. If it is not on the server, it should not be in the client. You can bypass that by disconnecting from the Internet before the restore, then moving the restored data to Local Folders before reconnecting. Only once reconnected and synced can you move the messages back to the Inbox on the server, and all will be fine.
So as I said automatic archiving is not a backup, because it just moves messages around in the database. But automatic archiving combined with eM Client’s own backup, could be a useful tool. The complete message, not just the header, will be moved from the server to a local folder and then on schedule backuped up to a zip file.