How to Backup Windows Live Mail to External Hard Drive?

Read time 7 minutes

Almost for everyone, emails are very important nowadays. Their personal and formal communications are very much dependent on email clients. In this scenario, imagine a situation where one had lost all their emails. Will it be bearable? Not at any cost! So, this blog is going to discuss all about how you can save yourself in such situations by creating a backup for the emails. In this write-up, we are going to focus on Windows Live Mail and different ways to backup its emails.

How May You Lose Emails, and Why is it Essential to Have a Backup on an External Hard Drive?

Every email client has a limit to which they can hold emails, beyond that limit, one has to save emails from the email platform to their system. It is nothing new that the data on your system is always vulnerable to loss. There are many situations in which you can lose your essential emails, a few of which are:

1. Virus attacks
2. Hard disk failures
3. Unfortunate accidental deletions
4. System formatting
5. Corruption

In some of these situations, you may lose your data permanently. But don’t worry, making a backup will give you peaceful sleep at night. Having a backup on an external drive is the wisest choice as it makes the data available on multiple locations. Similarly, saving backup in different formats works magic as you have your data safe almost forever.

Backup Windows Live Mail on External Hard Drive Manually

You can easily backup Windows Live Mail emails on your system or an external drive by following the below-mentioned steps:

1. Start with creating an empty folder wherever you want to save the backup.
2. Now, open Windows Live Mail and login to your account.
3. As the program opens, click on the Windows Live Mail icon and select Export email and then select Email messages.
   
4. Click on Browse and select the folder you have made for backup. I have selected Desktop and the folder I made there; similarly, you can select the external device. Click on the Next button to proceed.
   
5. Select the required folders to export or select All folders and click on Next.
6. Wait for the process to finish.
   
7. Once done, click on the Finish button.

Once you perform all the above steps carefully and successfully, you can check the exported data in your new folder, you made in your external hard drive. All the emails will be saved in the EML format.

Backup Windows Live Mail on an External Drive in an Automated Way

The best way to backup Windows Live Mail to Hard Drive is by converting the saved EML files to another format. Doing this, you will be having its access to your backed-up files on multiple platforms so that if one platform becomes inaccessible due to any reason, you can take it from another. Let’s try doing it with the most renowned third-party tool, i.e., Kernel for EML to PST.

1. Download the tool from the website and install it properly.
Free Download 100% Secure
2. Run the tool finally, and as you open it, you will see that your system data with proper hierarchy is listed on the left side of the screen. Now, all you need to do is locate your EML files where they are saved on the system.
3. Once you have traced the location of the EML files, all the EML files will display on the preview section of the tool. Now, click on the Save button.
4. The next step is Conversion Options, where you need to define the criteria for the conversion. Here we are creating the backup and hence need to convert all items, so I simply selected Convert all items. Similarly, you can go for Define Conversion rules and define them one by one as the tool asks for them. Click on Next.
5. At this stage, select the format in which you want to save your EML files. Once selected, click on the Browse button, and because you want to save the file on an external drive, then select the drive location as the saving destination. Click on the Save button to proceed.
   
   Note: You can go for MSG format if that is what you require, I prefer PST.
6. The saving process will start, and you will be able to check the progress on the screen. Wait for the saving process to finish.
7. Once the saving is done, you will be notified, click on OK, and end the process.
8. Finally, check the external drive where you have saved the file. This is how you can backup Windows Live Mail to external hard drive in PST format.

Conclusion

We have discussed how you can take backup Windows Live Mail to external hard drive. We discussed how one could do it with traditional methods and with an automated method. In the automated method, we converted the EML file to PST and then saved it on an external hard drive so that we can have the backup in a different format too. Users can also convert multiple EML files into single PST by using this tool.