Referring to the excellent article in PC Magazine mentioned by Bruce (and I agree with everything it states and I have always practised what it preaches), it states that "Note that most solutions can't restore individual e-mail messages, because they see your whole mailbox as a single file. (As a safeguard, make sure your e-mail accounts keep a copy of every message on the server.)"

I can only talk about Outlook Express, and I have moved my store folder to one of my partitions (away from the OS system) and this is done by going to Tools \ Options \ Maintenance tab \ Store Folder button \ Change button. You can move the message file to any location, even into a folder within My Documents. And you could have My Documents in a separate partition away from the OS system.

From my reading of the New York Times article, the same would apply to the .pst file in Microsoft Outlook.

To back this up, using Windows Explorer, simply copy the store folder to any location you want.

When messages folder become over-full, using Windows Explorer, simply change the name to a unique identifier, and create a new folder. Then follow the above procedure and make the new folder the store folder.

One of the weaknesses of ViaVoice 10.5 is that the user voice files are on the OS system drive there is no automatic backup feature as in DNS. Therefore is always important for ViaVoice users to back up the user folders on a regular basis using the manual back-up system within ViaVoice Options, and/or simply copying the user folders from C: \ Documents and Settings \ [prime user name] \ Application Data \ IBM \ ViaVoice \ Users and copying to your back up location. I have the latter simplified this by putting a new folder on my Desktop with two short cuts in that – the location of my principal user folder and the backup location. I have put in my computer diary an automatic weekly reminder to do the back up. The whole operation does not take more than 30 seconds.

As regards Referring to the excellent article in PC Magazine mentioned by Bruce (and I agree with everything it states and I have always practised what it preaches), it states that "Note that most solutions can't restore individual e-mail messages, because they see your whole mailbox as a single file. (As a safeguard, make sure your e-mail accounts keep a copy of every message on the server.)"

I can only talk about Outlook Express, and I have moved my store folder to one of my partitions (away from the OS system) and this is done by going to Tools \ Options \ Maintenance tab \ Store Folder button \ Change button. You can move the message file to any location, even into a folder within My Documents. And you could have My Documents in a separate partition away from the OS system.

From my reading of the New York Times article, the same would apply to the .pst file in Microsoft Outlook.

To back this up, using Windows Explorer, simply copy the store folder to any location you want.

When messages folder become over-full, using Windows Explorer, simply change the name to a unique identifier, and create a new folder. Then follow the above procedure and make the new folder the store folder.

One of the weaknesses of ViaVoice 10.5 is that the user voice files are on the OS system drive there is no automatic backup feature as in DNS. Therefore is always important for ViaVoice users to back up the user folders on a regular basis using the manual back-up system within ViaVoice Options, and/or simply copying the user folders from C: \ Documents and Settings \ [prime user name] \ Application Data \ IBM \ ViaVoice \ Users and copying to your back up location. I have the latter simplified this by putting a new folder on my Desktop with two short cuts in that – the location of my principal user folder and the backup location. I have put in my computer diary an automatic weekly reminder to do the back up. The whole operation does not take more than 30 seconds.

If you are formatting the disk before restoring the image, this is not necessary. However if you are simply restoring the image overwriting the existing files and folders, I believe defragmenting is necessary. A programme such as Diskkeeper makes light work of this operation.

Quentin

The article says:

"Note, though, that if you're using the imaging tool's incremental backup, you may want to avoid defragmenting your source drive. Since, under the covers, the imaging tools see your hard drive as a collection of sectors and clusters, a hard drive change like a defrag requires a new backup of every bit of data that was moved to another physical location on the drive, even if the actual file contents didn't change."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1847454,00.as...

The implication is that if you use imaging, then after defragging you might as well do a complete rather than an incremental backup. So if you use imaging and defragment regularly, then you should always do a complete rather than an incremental image.

Bruce

PS: They neglect to mention amongst their tips and tricks that you should do basic clean up before backing up to minimize wasted storage space, i.e., empty all caches, delete temp files, etc. However, since defragging itself is a potentially crippling operation (though I can't recall the last time defragging left me unable to operate my system), you should defrag after rather than before backing up. Or, if you follow their suggestion to mix imaging with traditional backup, you could image, defrag, then backup.