Rating: 5

Version tested: 2.0

Description: Amic Email Backup is a small, free program that can backup and restore the data associated with most major email clients, including identities, email and news messages, address book, accounts, message rules/filters, signatures, and even the blocked senders list. It works with a number of email clients including MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, PocoMail, Netscape Messenger, Opera Mail, and Incredimail.

There are 3 things you can do with this program: backup data, restore data, or schedule a backup; what I like is that these are handled in a very simple and straightforward manner. Here are some notes on this program:

• You can use Amic Email Backup to sync your emails across multiple machines (you cannot, however, back up your email from one application and restore it into another; e.g. PocoMail to Outlook).
• The are 2 user-interface modes; standard mode and wizard mode. Both are self-explanatory and easy to use, although wizard mode looks way cooler.
• The Scheduler: this is a fairly sophisticated feature. You can tell it the date and time to start the backup, as well as what period to wait before executing subsequent backups (how many months or weeks or days or hours). The options tab allows you to specify weather you want to override your original backup when a new backup takes place, or you could choose to keep a number of the latest backups (say, keep only the latest 3 backups).
  
• Note that once you schedule a backup, Amic seems to run an ’EmailAutobackup’ process in the background and install it as a startup process. You do not have to have the application open at the time of a scheduled backup for it to take place. The backup, when it occurs, happens almost invisibly in the background (although it takes up significant CPU resources).
• Amic creates zip-file backups that can broken down to user specified chunks (i.e. you could request, say, 700 meg chunks that would fit on individual CD’s).
• Backups are fairly quick and painless (it took 4-5 minutes to backup 2 years worth of Outlook email on my machine).
• Does not support Thunderbird; if you are looking for the same functionality for Thunderbird check out Mozbackup.
• Although the documentation states that supported Outlook versions are 2000, 2002, and 2003, I used this program on Outlook 2007 and it worked perfectly.
• You can also use Amic Email Backup to backup your internet explorer favorites.
• You cannot backup mail stored on a network drive; however, you can backup and restore to/from a network drive.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• A message notifying you that a scheduled backup is about to begin; also, it would be cool if there was a way to easily pause or abort the backup process once it kicks in, or even to set its priority.

The Verdict: I really like this program as an on-demand email backup utility. I would use it for scheduled backups as well if I didn’t already use a comprehensive backup program for my system in general (I use Karen’s Replicator for that, but am experimenting with Cobian Backup). All in all Amic Email Backup is a great little free program that I recommend highly.

Compatibility: Winall.

Go to the program home page to get the latest version (approx 1.3 megs).