Backup Outlook.com Emails to Hard Drive – Simple Techniques

User Query: “I have been using Outlook.com for a very long time for my official work and want to backup Outlook.com emails to external hard drive. There are a lot of emails and documents piled up in my mailbox, which I cannot risk losing. Therefore, I need to safeguard them by creating a backup. Can you recommend a sorted way to do it?”

Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) is a free web-based email, document, calendar, and task management service. All of its services are delivered via the cloud.

The main benefit of Outlook.com is that it is accessible from anywhere and also synchronized with your desktop Outlook data.

Being so busy using these web-based services like Outlook.com, we should not forget that it is our responsibility to backup Outlook.com emails.

We all are very well aware of the time when Outlook.com data was compromised in 1999 and 2001. Thus, it is always better to be prepared beforehand than to rectify the error later.

So, how to do it?

This is why this article is written to bring a solution to your problems and suggest a method to effortlessly backup your emails to an external hard drive.

Get started with the methods for the backup process.

What Methods Are There to Backup Outlook.com Emails to External Hard Drive?

Let us discuss the manual as well as expert-suggested method one by one using which you will easily be able to download your data to the hard drive.

Also, find the reasons for which users may want to export the data as explained in the article later. There are a few limitations of the manual method that are also mentioned while explaining the process.

First, take a look at the expert solution for this process.

1. Expert-Suggested Method to Backup Outlook.com Emails

Hotmail Backup Tool is a multi-faceted application that can be used to backup all the emails to computer.

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This tool allows you to save your data in a variety of email formats like PST, MBOX, EML, PDF and MSG. After the backup, the folder structure of the emails is preserved.

It also gives the users the option of incremental backup if they create backup at regular intervals. Not to forget, the Date-filter which allows specifying a date range and directing the tool to retrieve only those emails that fall within that range.

Backup Outlook.com emails to external hard drive following the steps given below:

Step 1: First, you need to install the software on the Windows platform.

Step 2: On the login page, enter your Outlook.com credentials and click on the Login button.

Step 3: Select the format in which you export all your emails and move them to the hard drive. Under ‘Select the Category’ choose emails for backup.

Step 4: Choose the location of the exported files by clicking on the Browse button.

Step 5: Backup Outlook.com emails selectively by pressing the Apply Filters option to make use of different features available.

Step 6: Finally, click on the Start button to download the data to a hard drive.

You can use the Delete after Download option and apply it during the procedure if you want to save space. This feature will delete all the data that you have downloaded and free up space from your mailbox.

Now, moving towards the manual method to create a backup.

2. Manual Way to Backup Outlook.com Emails to External Hard Drive

Microsoft does not provide a direct export option for extracting Hotmail emails.

However, there is a way to save your emails to the hard drive. But the problem here is that it can be done only one at a time.

Step 1: Open the browser and sign in to your Outlook.com account.

Step 2: Navigate to the email for which you want to make a backup.

Step 3: Click the down arrow next to the Reply option in the message’s header area to backup Outlook.com emails.

Step 4: Choose View message source from the context menu that appears.

Step 5: Once the message’s source code is displayed, press Ctrl+A to highlight the entire text and then Ctrl+C to copy the highlighted code. Check if your browser offers an option to save the email source code in .eml format.

Step 6: Navigate to File and select Save. Rename the file, as in the email message source tab, followed by a .eml extension. For saving purposes, most browsers only support .html or .htm extensions.

Step 7: Click on Continue and backup Outlook.com emails to external hard drive.

Why Do Users Want to Backup Their Data to Hard Drive?

1. To protect the Outlook.com data from hacking, virus attacks, ransomware attacks, and other issues.
2. Many web-mail services become sluggish and inefficient when there are too many emails stored in the mailbox. Therefore, those emails should be transferred and removed from the server to free up space.
3. Another reason can be, when users are migrating to a different webmail service, they should backup their data before exporting it to the other one.

Last Words

You should backup Outlook.com emails to external hard drive to keep it safe. Outlook.com provides in-demand features like its A-level security, emailing, chatting and saving data in the server.

Thus, the tool can be used to provide an efficient solution to create a backup on the local storage and then move it to external hard drive.

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