How to Back Up and Recover Your Company's Email Data

Why Is Backing Up Your Email Data Important?

For many businesses, especially small businesses, email is the primary mode of communication with clients, vendors, partners, service providers, and more. Email is also often the main form of internal communication, with managers and coworkers exchanging information throughout the day.

Losing email data can have major repercussions for your business, including:

Operational disruptions due to the loss of important information

Operational disruptions are the most immediately obvious result of email data loss.

You may find yourself missing:

• Company memos, business or marketing plans, newsletters, internal documents, information on intellectual property
• Communications with clients, vendors, or investors, including sensitive client information or financial details
• Sales negotiations and contracts, receipts, financial records, and legal documentation

All of these can lead to delays in responding to customers and other organizations involved with helping your business run, slow down progress on projects or negotiations, and lead to confusion or an increased need for supervision among employees.

Compliance violations as a result of incomplete records

Depending on the type of company you own and your industry, your business may be required to retain your emails for a certain period of time.

Examples of requirements by business type in the US:

• Companies with employees must keep employment tax records on file for 4 years (IRS)
• Publicly traded companies must keep financial data on file for 7 years (Sarbanes-Oxley Act)

Examples of requirements by industry in the US:

• Healthcare providers must keep records for 6 years (HIPAA compliance)
• Securities broker-dealers must keep records for 6 years (SEC Rule 17a-4)

If your company is taken to court or audited and is found not to have kept email records for the required amount of time, you could face major legal consequences.

Loss of credibility in the eyes of clients, partners, and the public

If your email data is lost due to a security breach and sensitive information, such as clients’ Social Security numbers, financial information, or health details, is involved, you’ll need to report the breach to the Federal Trade Commission and other related agencies.

You’ll also be required to notify all of the individuals whose personal information was compromised. You need make them aware of the nature of the breach, the type of information stolen, and the likelihood of that information being misused.

If no sensitive information was compromised, you’re not required to inform your clients, vendors, or other parties you’ve communicated with over email. However, you may have to let these parties know that you’ve lost important conversations or forgotten details, which can negatively affect their impression of your company and your professionalism.

How Can Your Email Data Be Lost?

The following are the most common ways businesses lose email data:

Human error: Deleting an email, or even an entire folder full of emails, can be an easy mistake made by anyone at your company. Unfortunately, if those emails aren’t backed up, they may be lost forever.

Equipment or software failure: If your email server goes down due to hardware issues or circumstances like a power outage, you may lose emails, or your email data may become corrupted. Service outages or bugs and cloud email platforms can also cause accidental deletions or loss of email data.

Cyberattacks: If you’re not using proper security protocols, your company could fall victim to phishing, ransomware, or other common email security breaches that result in the theft of sensitive information or intentional deletion of data.

Backup and synchronization failures: Even if you have a backup procedure in place, you may still lose email data if there is an error in backup synchronization across multiple devices, resulting in incomplete backups or the replication of corrupted files rather than healthy data.

Find out how to choose a secure email provider for your business.

How to Back Up Your Emails: Best Practices

Having a strong email backup system for your company is vital. With the right system in place, you can easily keep required records on file, save important conversations, and, hopefully, avoid the hassle and costs of losing important information.

Here’s how to keep your emails backed up:

1. Create an email retention policy

If your company operates in an industry where keeping records for a certain amount of time is required, or if you just want to make sure that important emails are saved, creating an email retention policy that identifies which emails must be retained, how, and for how long is an essential first step for your business.

2. Decide on a backup solution

Most email providers do not include a dedicated email backup service, so you’ll need to find a third-party or in-house email backup solution that works for you.

When choosing an email backup solution, you’ll want to consider:

Automation: While it’s possible to manually back up your emails, it’s much easier to take advantage of an email backup service or have your IT department create an email backup system that will automatically save your email data. Automated backup reduces the chances of email lost due to human error and allows you to save large volumes of emails without having to select or download individual files, saving you both time and effort.

Storage options: Do you want to save your email data on an external hard drive, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system, or use cloud storage? Make sure that the solution you choose allows you to save your emails in a way that’s convenient for you.

Data encryption: Because your email data may contain sensitive client or business information, it’s important to make sure that the data is encrypted while stored. That way, even if your stored email data gets into the wrong hands, it may not be comprehensible because it’s encrypted. For maximum security,  AES-256 encryption is recommended. AES-256 uses a cipher algorithm to keep data safe and is favored by governmental, healthcare, and financial institutions.

Access: Limiting access to your email data can also limit the chances of data loss due to human error (untrained employees) and theft (bad actors). The ability to implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) can help ensure that only authorized individuals can access certain data or perform certain tasks within the system.

3. Determine your backup frequency

For the majority of businesses, a scheduled daily backup works fine. However, if your business deals with a large volume of emails or if every single email is important, you may opt for an hourly or even near-continuous backup schedule.

4. Determine your data backup location(s)

Experts recommend using the 3-2-1 rule: keep three copies of your email data, use two different types of storage media, and keep one copy stored off-site. Using cloud storage as your off-site data storage location can be especially convenient if your external storage devices are damaged or destroyed in a disaster such as a fire or flood.

5. Conduct regular backup audits

Test your backup system on a regular basis to ensure that your emails are being backed up correctly. If you have a backup system in place, but your backup files end up corrupted or incomplete, you’ll still lose valuable email data.

Disaster Recovery for Lost Emails

Ideally, your company will never experience a major email data loss. But if it does, you’ll need to have a plan for restoring your emails from your backups.

Step 1: Figure out what went wrong

If you experience email loss due to a cyberattack, you may need to report this attack and loss to the FTC or other agencies. You may also need to enlist IT support to remove malware or ensure that hackers are locked out of your system following the attack. Additionally, you may need to train staff on email security protocols so that you don’t experience another cyberattack in the future. If human error or equipment failure is the reason for your email data loss, you’ll need to know how to prevent this issue from repeating.

Step 2: Find your most recent backup

Once you locate your most recent backup, you’ll need to verify that the files aren’t corrupted. This is especially important if you have been subject to a cyberattack or virus.

Step 3: Restore your email data

The protocol for restoring your email data will vary according to your email provider and your backup service. Usually, this will take two or three steps, and you’ll need to import your email data files into your inbox. In some systems, it may be as easy as clicking on “restore” in a certain menu, and in others, you may need to convert files and select a file path. If you’re not sure, bring in some IT support or get more information from your email provider.

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