If your small business' server has a regimented backup process, you may still be overlooking one of the most critical sources of information: email. Outlook doesn't automatically back it up, your ISP might (or might not) - you may be running on fumes. You want a simple, repeatable strategy that allows you to find the piece of critical project communication when you need it. Here is a set of guidelines that has worked for us:

1. File emails into as few folders as you can stomach.  While it is tempting to file emails into a folder hierachy several levels deep - that often reults in later confusion - "Where did I file that? By recipient? By subject? By project? I can't find it and I don't know where else I would have thought to put it."  I file emails by project, and into a single level below that by recipient type: client, consultant, agency.  For legal reasons, a claims folder is useful, as anything in that folder should be protected communication should a legal issue arise.

2. Let the computer do what it is good at: indexing and searching.  Tools like Google Desktop, Copernicus, etc. will crawl your files and the text in them, making an indext that is usually searchable in seconds. 
3. Choose a typical archive date.  This will vary depending on how much email you typically recieve, and what you do with it, but a good rule of thumb is either 6 or 12 months.  I archive annually, which pushes emails from last year into a separate .PST file (archive2010.pst, archive2009.pst, etc.).  While current versions of Outlook manage the size of the .PST file and are not subject to the 2GB limit, I have had too many instances of corruption of the .PST file to simply allow it to go unmanaged.

4. Archive emails every 3-6 months.  This keeps the size of the main .PST file small, expecially if you recieve a large amoung of attached files.  The archive is indexe and still searchable - you will still be able to find the older emails, but you don't need to have them clogging your main working file.

5. Backup these PST files weekly.  When we check emails frequently (or constantly) during the day, it desensitizes us to the amount of email we recieve. Even if you recieve only 25 emails a day, that's still over 100 every week - how many of these would you be willing to lose?  How many decisions do you want to make again? How many people do you want to have to beg to send you another copy of an email that you lost? At the very least, buy a $50 usb drive and back up your Outlook user folder to the drive - is a good option for Windows users - .  SyncBackSE and SyncBackPro are good options for Windows users, a limited free version is also available.

While project files are damaging to lose, If you've got a backup, you can be up and running quickly.  Don't allow PST corruption or a hard-drive crash to sink you into emergency scramble mode.

If you use Gmail or another webmail service, you can Thunderbird to periodically slurp down a backup copy of your email messages:  see this article from LIfehacker.  If you want to automate this process, it's a little more complicated, but certainly acheivable:  follow these instructions:.

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