What happens to your email in a crash?

Imagine the situation; you are working on your PC reading your email and suddenly the lights go out. There's been a power failure. When you return to your PC and switch it back on, nothing happens. It will not restart. The disk has been corrupted during the power failure. You suddenly get that sinking feeling when you remember that all of your emails and attachments for the past five years are on that PC.

"You did do a routine back-up of your email database. Didn't you?"

"Your back-up file was on the hard disk? Now you really are stuffed aren't you?"

"No, not to worry; I keep a copy of my documents on Dropbox, so I'll be okay."

"Didn't you keep a copy of your email database on Dropbox? No? Oh dear!"

I've heard this scenario all too often. It is a great pity when you realise that you can keep a copy of your important files offsite on Amazon for a few pence.  Amazon's AWS Glacier storage allows archive of files cheaply with a retrieval time of just a few hours. It works out at about half a cent/penny per gigabyte per month. You can have a faster retrieval on AWS, but that is slightly more expensive.

More about this, and how to achieve it, later...

I've just done that for my wife's email - it was 8 Gbytes!  The peace of mind is priceless.