A computer crash lost my Outlook data file - what should I use instead of Outlook to prevent this in the future?

Email Providers and Organizations ... and Outlook

Outlook is neither an email provider nor an organization. It is simply an email program that you run on your PC. Other examples of programs might include Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and hundreds of others.

Desktop email programs send and receive email through a service that you have an account with. Examples of email services include Hotmail, Gmail, perhaps the one that you use at work or school to send and receive email, and most commonly, your ISP.

My point is that they are two different things.

Your email service (or "organization as provider" to use your term) isn't going to help you much when your PC crashes and wipes out the files containing your email. Put bluntly, that's not their responsibility.

Computer Crashes ... and Outlook

When your computer crashes, the best that we can say is that "results are unpredictable". Frequently, nothing is affected - you reboot, perhaps fix a problem, and carry on.

Every once in a while, the results are much more severe. Perhaps a file gets corrupted or completely wiped out.

And yes, it's possible that the file that gets destroyed happens to be your Outlook data file.

Here's the problem with the question as you've posed it: It doesn't matter which email program you run - a crash can destroy any and all information on your machine.

Any and all.

Even if your research was in a completely different email program - or even stored in files outside of any email program at all - they were still at risk.

A computer crash could have destroyed the files just as easily, Outlook or not.

The Solution? Backups

Any information that you have stored in one and only one place - and I don't care what that place is - is not backed up. You run the risk of losing everything if "that place" should ever have a problem.

If that place is your Outlook data file in your computer, then should anything ever happen to that file, it's all gone ... *poof*.

If that one place is anywhere on your computer's hard drive, then should that hard drive ever fail, once again ... *poof*. All gone. Forever.

The solution, of course, is backups - regular backups that squirrel away your most important data files at a minimum and everything on your system at best.Then, should there ever be a catastrophic failure of any sort, you've always got the most recent backup to revert to, minimizing the amount of data lost.

And, in any case, it wouldn't matter if you were using Outlook, Thunderbird, Word or Notepad. Anything that you'd stored on your computer would be vulnerable to a crash and restored by a backup.

Seems ideal.

Is Outlook Less Resilient?

There is one legitimate issue that you raise; that of Outlook's approach to storing your data.

By default, Outlook stores your email, contacts calendar and whatever else in a single .pst file. This file is in a proprietary format and not easily accessible by other programs.

So, yes, a hard-disk problem that might damage only a single file can wreak a lot of havoc if that one file is your Outlook .pst file.

Other email programs typically organize data into folders and files on your hard disk, making them somewhat more resilient to issues that might affect single files - the damage might be more localized.

But, all of this is completely moot if you have a good backup in place.

Besides, a true catastrophic failure could render everything inaccessible. When that happens, it doesn't matter if it's stored in one file or many - they're all gone.