I use a message store on  my data drive so that everything gets backed up automatically. I recently had a problem with this drive failing, bad sectors etc, and during this failure Live Mail could not open the store and proceeded to create a new store in the default /User/ location.

Of course after replacing the drive and restoring all my data Live Mail made very heavy work of reconnecting to this store. I ended up having to import all emails and move them to my chosen store folders etc.

Now, in order to protect myself from this unnecessary work should a drive fail in the future I have installed a Synology NAS with two 2TB drives set as RAID1. Great, if one fails the other seamlessly takes over.

My concern is that if the NAS goes offline for whatever reason and Live Mail can't see the msg store, it will create a new one in /Users/ again. How do I stop this happening? and if it does happen how do I revert to the correct message store without having to import everything manually?

As an aside, I was considering upgrading to Outlook, but it seems there is no easy way to back up profiles to cover the above eventuality, and you can't move profiles out of the reg, so a loss of my OS drive will create a similar but different problem. Other options have similar downsides ie Thunderbird etc.