andrew027:

 

littleheaven: Going forward, there is a third-party add-on you can install in Microsoft Outlook that backs up your chosen email folders to a hard-drive destination of your choice. It runs every time I shut Outlook down. I have mine backing up to a OneDrive folder, so that backup is then cloud backed up. Haven't tested a restore yet, though. 

 

Thanks @littleheaven - what's it called? I may investigate that, depending on the answer to this question:

 

I've recently started using outlook.co.nz and added my xtra and gmail accounts to it. Am I right in saying that if I had another hardware failure, my mail is "safe" in outlook.co.nz and old emails could be accessed from a new PC once I installed the Outlook app on it and pointed that to my outlook.co.nz account?

 

While that wouldn't technically be a backup solution, it does give me some "business continuity".

 

As long as it stored your mail indefinitely, regardless of whether you also downloaded it to Outlook for Office as well, it could be a solution. I've just pulled down all my old Yahoo.co.nz mails (going back to 2002) into a local Thunderbird account on my Mac. Whatever was in the inbox came down just fine. The archived folders didn't, so I just moved their contents into the inbox folder by folder, downloaded it, and moved it back. 

The Outlook addin is located here: https://outlookbackupaddin.codeplex.com/ It's free. Sometimes it can slow the Outlook launch down a little, but it's a compromise I'm okay with. I've been using it about six months now.