How To Backup Apple Mail & Preferences

Apple Mail

I can’t stress enough the importance of backing up.  If I asked you today, “When’s the last time you backed up?”  Can you tell me?  Have you ever backed up?  Well, let’s start with the basics.  The following tip is for those who own Macs and use Apple Mail.  You may be a long time Apple user or maybe you a new member of the cult of Mac.  Whichever you are, this a basic tip on how to manually back up your Apple Mail messages and To back up your preferences:

1.Get a USB thumb drive, external hard drive, or maybe even a burnable disc.  Create a  folder on your external device. For example, you might call it “Mail Prefs Backups 2_16_09″
2.Quit Mail.
3.In the Finder choose Home from the Go menu.
4.Open the Library folder.
5.Open the Preferences folder.
6.Copy the “com.apple.mail.plist” file to the folder you made in step 1.  You can either copy & paste, or “option-drag” it over to the folder. Remember, don’t move the original files, just copy them.
7.Close the Preferences folder.
8.Open the Mail folder.
9.Copy the “MessageRules.plist” file.
10.Copy the “SmartMailboxes.plist” file.
11.Finally, copy the Signatures folder.

To restore:
Move all copies of the files and folders to the original locations from which they came, as listed above.

How to manually back up Mail messages:

1.Quit Mail.
2.From the Finder’s Go menu, choose Home.
3.Open the Library folder.
4.Copy the folder “Mail” to your backup location. Again, you can use an external hard drive or burnable disc.  And remember, don’t move your files, copy them.

You can restore backed-up mailboxes at any time by quitting Mail and moving the copies back to their original locations just like the previous example.

Another tip:  There are ways of automatically backing up things such as your email with MobileMe or a program like SuperDuper. It’s always a good idea to know how to manually do these things.