For the second time in less than a year Live Mail has just lost the emails in my Storage folder. I use Windows 7 and have used Live Mail since Outlook Express was withdrawn (never had a problem with Outlook Express!) I have a Hotmail account and two other email accounts, and store everything on my PC. Last time it lost some of the emails in lower level folders in the Storage folder (I tend to use folders within folders, within folders quite a lot). I managed to find them in the C drive 'Users' folder and recover them last time. This time they seem to have disappeared. The only difference is that I now have it set to automatically compress when I close the program (this could be my biggest mistake). At the weekend as I turned it on I got a message saying something like 'can't find the database', it then proceeded to take all the deleted emails in one of the accounts and place them into the inbox, and lose everything from the other email account entirely, although the Hotmail account was OK (not surprising because this is stored on the web as well as on my PC). More annoyingly it lost everything from my Storage folder. It created two 'Recovered items' folders and one has the complete filing system of folders that I previously had except in each folder the emails are just copies of one email (the top one in the list in that folder), although all the original email titles still exist. Fortunately, after the last failure I have saved some (but not all unfortunately) of the more important emails to files in my Explorer filing system and these still open OK so I guess they have been saved separately as well as in the Storage folder filing system. I have now decided that Live Mail is not fit for purpose so I was wondering if Outlook would be better but amazingly I find that Microsoft suggest that Outlook is backed up to Live Mail (LOL).

Having established this I would like to know if there is a way to back up the Live Mail Storage folder to somewhere safe where Live Mail can't lose it. It's not easy to use the method that I have been using, ie saving each email to a file separately, because that takes too long with some having to be renamed to avoid clashing titles. Or can somebody recommend an email program that works reliably.