Is it possible to backup the Windows Address Book and Outlook Express emails onto a CD or USB drive, so these can be recovered to the computer or a different computer? My computer is running Windows XP.

You will be glad to know it is a relatively easy process to backup your Windows Address Book and Outlook Express emails, as these are stored in somewhat self-contained folders which you can simply copy and instantly have an almost complete backup. You will first need to open My Computer or Windows Explorer. Both the Windows Address Book and Outlook Express mail store folders are hidden, so we will need to enable the display of hidden files and folders. Go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options” and in the window that appears click the “View” tab. Enable “Show hidden files and folders”. You should also disable (untick) “Hide extensions for known file types”. Once these settings have been changed, click OK.

As a first step, we will do a backup of your Windows Address Book. Navigate to the following location on your computer: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Microsoft. You should see a folder named “Address Book” within this directory. On opening the Address Book folder you will see your address book file contained within. To verify this is the correct file, double-click on the Address Book (WAB) file and this should open in the Windows Address Book application with all your contacts. Once you are satisfied that the Address Book file is your address book, simply copy the entire “Address Book” folder to a different location (such as a CD or USB drive) and you now have a backup of your address book.

We will now look at how to backup your Outlook Express email. Navigate to the following location on your computer: C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{ABCD…1234…}\Microsoft. You should see a folder named “Outlook Express” within this directory. If you open the Outlook Express folder you will see a whole list of DBX files, with the names of all your mail folders within Outlook Express. As you may have realised, each of the DBX files represents one of your Outlook Express mail folders. To backup Outlook Express, you will just need to copy the entire “Outlook Express” folder to a different location, such as a CD or USB drive.

Should you need to recover your data from these backups in the future you just need to copy the data back from your backup into their original folder on your C drive. However, be aware, if you do this you will overwrite the data on your computer with the backup version. This is a particular cause for concern if you have more recent email on your computer, but need to recover some of your older email which has been lost. If you simply copy your backup copy over the top of the live copy on your C drive then this replaces all the mail store files with the versions as of the date of the backup. As such, you will have lost any email between when you took the backup and the current date. Therefore, use caution before you restore the backup. Additionally, the Outlook Express backup only backs-up your email. All your account settings, mail rules (if any), etc. are not contained in the backup, so these would need to be re-entered in Outlook Express prior to restoring your email.