Mozilla's Thunderbird is an excellent all-round email client, and one which offers significant advantages in security and reliability over Microsoft's Outlook. It is a great choice for single users and businesses alike. As with any other email client, it is important that you know how to protect your data. Email can be the lifeblood of a business as well as enormously important to an individual. As such, it should be backed up regularly. This is not a very intuitive process in Thunderbird but it does not have to be difficult.

The first step to protecting you emails, whether you are using Thunderbird or any other client, is to make sure that they are left on the server after being downloaded. This may consumer some space, but it will ensure that the messages exist on your local computer and the server, which is likely to be the most reliable place to have them.

In the event of a server failure and/or the failure or your local system, you are going to want a local backup of your email. The best way to do this is to backup your email's folder. Here are the steps:

Tools (or Edit, depending on your version) > Account Settings > Server Settings > Local Directory

In Windows the directory will look like: C:\Documents and Settings\*username*\ Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxx.default\Mail\*accountname*

In Ubuntu it will look something like this location: /home/*username*/.mozilla-thunderbird/xxxxxx.default/Mail/Local Folders

Inside this folder the is raw data for your emails. All you have to do to back up the emails is to save this folder in a secure location. Restoring the emails is a matter of dropping the saved folder into a chosen profile.

Before backing up it is a good idea to compact the email. To so this:

Select the account > File > Compact Folders

As opposed to backing up Thunderbird manually, there are a number of programs which will do this for you. My experience with them as been mixed, but some do the job quite nicely once properly configured.

Picking the right backup utility is usually pretty difficult, as many of them seem to be similar to one another and the only time when they are actually put to use is during some sort of emergency. Your best bet is to actually choose a few and try them to see if they suit your needs.

MozBackup

This one of the best Mozilla back up programs. It is freeware and supports Firefox, Thunderbird, the Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, and Netscape. It is easy to use and install, but support is limited and there is no Linux version available yet.

EZ Thunderbird Backup

This is commercial software (available for $14.95, or $19.95 for Pro version) which backs up Thunderbird's email. The company also make utilities for IE, Palm, Eudora, and so on. The features of this program include an easy-to-use Wizard interface, automatic backups using Windows Task Scheduler, backups to ZIP files, password protection, and a restoration program restoration program. The Pro version also can writes backups to CD/DVD.

There are a number of other options out there but these two both work well. Doing the task manually is very easy, but a tool can be useful for extras, like having the backup done automatically or also backing up extensions. Either way this is something which is very important to do and can be easily overlooked if you are not in a data-protecting mindset.