Today MacFixIt carries one of those gut-wrenching horror stories from a reader that you read about from time to time:

Tonight, while cleaning up my address book to sync to the blackberry, I got the spinning ball of death, which resulted in having to restart the computer. When I did, address book was empty the next time I opened it. Database gone. Backup database gone.

Not long ago, a Hawk Wings reader experienced something similar after syncing his PowerBook with a Nokia 6682. Although he enjoyed the added bonus of a very puzzling exchange with Apple Tech Support following his wipe-out.

Of course, prevention is the best cure. That is to say, you can’t really lose what you have backed up. Back up your ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder often.

However, if you find yourself in a jam and the backup is not as up-to-date as it might be, there is still hope.

Address Book is smart. It keeps a little backup of its own in a AddressBook.data.previous file inside the directory mentioned above:

To restore it, all you need to do is quit Address Book, delete the dead AddressBook.data file and rename the backup to AddressBook.data. Whew!

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Even though there are a truckload of backup solutions for Apple Mail, ranging from Apple’s own Backup software to dedicated apps like Email Backup and many more, the statistics are damning.

During the keynote at WWDC this year, we learnt that only 25% of Mac users perform backups and only 4% of them do it in a fail-safe automated way.

So another option is always welcome.

Doug Blatti has written an applescript that will backup your Mail folder and Address Book quickly, neatly and conveniently.

All you have to do is launch it. It will prompt you to close Mail and Address Book if they are open and go about its business:

It took about 9 minutes to create a zipped up backup of my Mail and Address Book. The zip file ends up at 620.5MB, just right for burning off onto a CD-Rom with some room to spare. (See further, “How the delete key is your best friend”).

That’s great. There’s only one problem. You.

Remember Apple’s high hopes that Time Machine in Leopard will drastically increase the number of people who do backups? As I’ve suggested before, they are kidding themselves:

Will it work? I don’t think so. The current ability to automate backups with Backup 3.0 and the plethora of third-party automated backup options haven’t brought large numbers of users to the party. This won’t either. It’s not the technical ability that’s missing; it’s the personal habit.

The best solution is to automate it with iCal, so that you are set free to develop more interesting and enjoyable personal habits.

It’s easy. Create an all-day event in iCal and under the alarm option, set it to “Open file”. Navigate to wherever you saved MailBackup.app and select it.

Set it to run at a time when you don’t usually use Mail.

I’m setting it to 9 am because I am having great success with the theory that you shouldn’t open your email until an hour or two after you start work (see more on this in “Emailing to live, not living to email”).

That’s the time to stay in control of your own agenda and actually get some stuff done.

Burn the backup file to a CD-Rom and store it somewhere safe. (Did you hear the one about the guy who kept his backup CD in his laptop case? One day his bag was stolen and…)

Now you are free to enjoy your bad habits worry-free. Your emails and contact details are safe.

NB: This script does not backup your Apple Mail preferences file, com.apple.mail.plist, which lives in your ~/Library/Preferences folder. Is it important? Ask Tim Bray .

You can find some more backup apps in the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List and in the Related posts section below.

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Email Backup and its shareware version Email Backup Pro have been updated.

The more fully-featured Email Backup Pro (shareware, USD 9.95) has improved restore functions, including the ability to restore backups made with the freeware version.

Also, you can now launch a restore by clicking on the backup file in Finder.

It now also supports GyazMail .

The freeware version (1.1.2) now quits the email client first in order to produce a more reliable backup.

You can read more about these simple backup utilities on the developer’s web pages for Email Backup and Email Backup Pro .

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I’ve had three emails in as many days from people wondering how to set up automated archiving in Mail.app, so that messages older than a specific date are moved out of the app and into a separate folder.

Although some other email clients do this (I have a vague memory that Outlook used to ask me about this from time to time), Mail doesn’t.

The only solution I could think of revolved around creating a repeating event in iCal, say once a month, and setting it to run the Archive script from Andreas Amann’s Mail scripts which can export messages in standard mbox format.

But that’s not very automated. You still need to select the mailboxes to export and other bits and pieces.

I asked Andreas Amann who is gobsmackingly clever with AppleScript why this isn’t easier to achieve. He tells me:

The problem is that AppleScript Studio applications themselves are not scriptable so they don’t lend themselves to be run without user interaction. Since my archive script needs the user to select which mailboxes to archive as well as some options for the archive, this won’t work.

Another solution would be to create a rule and then apply that to selected message. However, since you can’t run rules via AppleScript either, this won’t work in an automated, non-interactive way either.

I guess people will have to look at some of the commercial offerings for this (I don’t know whether they support automated or timed archiving though…)

Any ideas? (Non-commercial solutions preferred)

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Graeme Mathieson has produced a great tutorial on using Mail.app as an offline archive for Gmail, complete with step-by-step instructions on creating the rules to push emails into the right folders and screenshots.

He recently switched to using Google apps for your domain but like any prudent Scot wanted access to his email when he is not online and “a backup should something go wrong” (see further — “Gmail user gets kneecapped” and the Gmail “Black Hole treatment”).

Nice.

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Email Backup Pro is an easy to use backup utility for all the major Mac email clients: Apple Mail, Entourage x.V and 2004, Thunderbird, Eudora.

Its simple interface and “set-and-forget” features make it hard for a user to claim that creating a regular backup is too much hassle. (See an earlier, more extensive Hawk Wings review.)

There is only one new feature in the 1.1 release, but it’s a good one—support for multiple email clients:

Email Backup Pro costs USD 9.95 and a demo version (with scheduling disabled) is available from the developer’s web site .

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