Inspired by this thread. In the linked thread, a Doper’s mother won some money gambling online. When she tried to collect, the received an email from the company and her computer crashed. OP’s mother was able to restore her emails from her ISP and there was a happy ending.
Do you back up your emails? Most of mine are routine, and I deleted them from the servers regularly. But there are several that I consider important, even if they no longer really are. I have multiple email addresses and the ones that really are important are on my computer, in the original webmail, and forwarded to at least one other webmail where they can be retrieved if needed. Not only does this protect them in case my computer crashes, it also makes them available if I’m at the office and away from my home computer. More than once have I accessed them for contact information and such.
My exchange server is about 3 feet behind me and it’s regularly backed up.
I delete nothing but spam and archive regularly into data drives that are in a raid array.
At work I’m even more insane about email and I document most conversations in a quick followup “Just to confirm what we discussed” email if they’re not already documented in meeting minutes.
Last year my husband upgraded our exchange server and managed to corrupt not only the data file but the backup. I was not pleased, but thanks to archives I did only lose about a month worth of email.
Oh, yeah. Generally I save everything at work. A couple of months ago I did go and delete a few thousand emails that couldn’t possibly be of any use now. Of course there was one emailed file I needed a week later. :smack: Speaking of files, we have a folder where we keep them. My coworker and my boss overwrite existing files when new data comes in. I prefer to save data on my local drive and then save them to the community folder when they’re done, so as not to clobber the previous month’s data. (Of course I can always get it from the previous month’s Sent email.)
Everything on my hard disks (email included) is backed up at least every other night, and the disk that has the OS on it is backed up to bootable backup; if the hard disk has a hardware failure I can immediately boot from my backup without even having to do a hardware swap.
I have a hole in my email archives, virtuall the entire year 1993 is gone. Aside from that I have pretty much everything going back to 1991.
At work, I save all my emails. In the past few years, we’ve been getting more routine, automatically generated emails now (some system is down; now it’s back up; some other system will be down; etc.), and I’ve been trying to delete those, but any emails related to my job I keep. About every six months, they get moved into an archive file when I get a “Your usage is large” email.
And yes, I refer to an old one once or twice a year.
At home, I should back up my emails, but mostly don’t. Ones I particularly want to save, I send to myself at work.
I answer a fair amount of trivia questions about the database program I work in, and/or get challenged by other long-term developers to provide a cite for some claim I toss out about when a feature was deprecated or something of that ilk.
Or I get in a nostalgic mood and decide to go down memory lane and read old personal emails.
A few months ago I applied for a job that involves working with children and they do some SERIOUS freaking intensive background checks. “Please list every single residence at which you have lived since 1973. Don’t leave anything out. We need the full addresses and the dates on which you moved”. Believe me, my only regret vis-a-vis my email packrat tendency was that I did not have emails going back to 1973…it sure was convenient to get the outbound emails to my friends & family listing each new address in full detail along with a date…
Hey, it’s not taking up much room on my hard disk. It’s all text. (Well, OK, file attachments I suppose).
