Knowledge Base Article #321242

Why is the Mail option disabled in my backup screen?

Your actual email messages are not backed up through this specific backup process. The disabled option is there to show you that your mail messages are not backed up. Without this option, some users may believe their messages were safely backed up when they were not.

So you may be wondering how to then safely backup your email messages from within Intellect. All messages within Intellect actually exist as separate files on your hard drive. By default, your Intellect mail is stored under My Documents\Chaos Data\Mail but you may have customized this location. Under the mailbox you will find all folders from within the mail portion of Intellect and all messages as separate files within those folders.

As you most likely have other data within your My Documents folder that you find important and as you may have already found a solution for backing up that data, we would recommend simply making sure your Chaos Data folder under My Documents is simply part of your current backup process outside of our software or (if you do not have a backup process currently) you implement a backup solution that retains everything from your My Documents as soon as possible.

You can also simply manually copy this mailbox or any portion of this mailbox to a backup location manually. Simply using Windows Explorer and a standard copy operation, the messages and folders can all be copied to a removable drive for instance. You could also write these folders to a CD for backup if your system supports that function. Later, any specific file or folder can then be restored from this backup location by simply copying the file back to your mailbox.

Also, built into Intellect is the ability to sync with removable media. This option can be found under the File menu. This will not only send contact, todo, memo, and appointment data to the removable media but will send all mail folders and messages to this location as well. This can take a long time as all files and folders will be sent. Though designed for syncing, this will effectively create a backup on this removable media of all your Intellect data.

In the end, having some sort of backup and restore process built into Intellect for mail messages would simply not be a viable option. Not only would this add several minutes to the backup process and any compression procedure could then result in the loss of your entire mail backup if that single file is damaged or corrupted but there are also already several backup solutions available for all the important data on your system.

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