I’m no expert on Windows, but I have to maintain it in our home.\u00a0 Of course, that means making back-ups of important records – including email messages.<\/p>\n
Well, I read how to back up Windows Live Mail messages from the people at microsoft<\/a>. I confess that the procedure didn’t work for me when trying to send the messages to a flash drive; however, I was able to export them to a folder on the desktop. Yet, the point of backing up files means you wouldn’t likely store the backup on the same computer whence the files originate. I guess you might do so if the computer has two hard drives; mine doesn’t.<\/p>\n So then I wondered: could I just copy the exported emails from their folder on the desktop to a USB drive?<\/p>\n The idea seemed to make sense – except that the folder holds 1.6 GB of data, and the transfer speed was reporting to be (no lie) under 10 kilobytes\/second. At that rate, the copy to the flash drive would take more than 44 hours. What was I doing wrong?<\/p>\n I’d read somewhere, I think on a Microsoft message board, that data transfer between different file systems can be slow. Of course, my Windows 7 hard drive uses NTFS format; what about my USB drives? I checked them all: FAT32, every single one.<\/p>\n Then I wondered – could I reformat one of the flash drives to NTFS? howtogeek.com<\/a> said it could be done. I moved some files off a USB drive that was nearly empty, then reformatted it to NTFS. Really, it couldn’t have been easier. (One should NEVER reformat a drive without very careful thought. All the current files on the drive must be saved elsewhere before the reformat to avoid losing them.)<\/strong><\/p>\n With the USB drive freshly converted to NTFS, I once again tried exporting the email messages to it from Windows Live Mail. This time it worked; the transfer rate was just over 1MB\/s. The transfer took around 25 minutes.<\/p>\n At the end, I checked the folder on the flash drive to which I’d (hopefully) exported the backed up email messages. There it was: all 1.6GB!<\/p>\n That’s how I exported email messages from Windows Live Mail to a flash drive. I don’t really know if it worked unless\/until I try to import them. But of course, that’s sometimes the case with backups, isn’t it? Furthermore, one hopes to never have to find out:)<\/p>\n