Scott Larson Consulting

By default your Applications store your personal data in the following locations:

In Windows 2000 or XP: <System drive>\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents
In Windows Vista or Seven: <System drive>:\Users\<user>\

Some Applications store the data in the folder the program was installed in or in <System drive>\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data. You have to check each location to make sure you data is where you think it is. Otherwise you could miss it durring the creation of your Backup. For the most part everything is stored in the default locations, unless you specify otherwise while saving your your documents.

Email data files and folders

The first step is to find out if you are checking mail on the web, or from a program such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird. Open up your email and look at the title bar at the top left.

Web-Based Email

Gmail, MSN Hotmail, and Yahoo are all web-based mail services that operate using a Internet Broswer such as Internet Explorer or Mozzilla Firefox. The important thing you need to remember is that your mail is stored on the server of whatever service you are using. If the service goes down or your data becomes lost due to a drive crash there is no guarantee that they can recover from that situation. You are depending on a service to maintain your data. From my experince that is a recipe for disaster. I had one customer that was not able to access her account because she lost her password, and forgot her secret question. When she contacted Yahoo they were unable to help her because the information she used to open up the account was different from what she remembered. She lost 4 years of personal corospondances, resumes, contact information in one clean sweep. Dont let this happen to you.

If you are storing email on a service like this you need to at least retrieve that email once in awhie on your computer. Using the POP or IMAP service, Gmail allows you to do this for free, but Yahoo requires that you pay a fee for this access. Once you have obtained the correct POP or IMAP information (Incomming/Outgoing Mail server names, ports and username/password configurations) you can then setup a Mail Client such as Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook, or Thunderbird to downlown your mail to your computer. If you have any questions about this, please contact me for more information.

Program-Based Email (Mail Client)

Outlook, Outlook Express (Windows Mail), and Mozzila Thunderbird are all examples of program-based email (Mail Client). Each stores the mail data in a seperate location that is not always easy to find. The best way to find out is to go into the program settings and see if it has a place where it stores mail data. For Windows 2000/XP the data store folder is usually located in <system drive>\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data. For Windows Vista and Seven the location is usually <system drive>:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local

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