Email, Contacts and Calendar Backup

Do you use an email manager such as Outlook Express or Microsoft Outlook to manage your address book contacts, emails, and calendars? If so, you’ll need to backup your contacts before switching to Ubuntu. Most email programs will allow you to export your contacts in Linux-friendly formats such as CSV. Perhaps in an attempt to force you to remain a Windows user, Microsoft Outlook can only export one address book entry at a time as a VCard file. So I recommend that you don’t use the VCard format unless you have a handful of contacts or less. 

You may also want to backup your email messages. If you’ve been using the IMAP method to download your messages into an email manager, then your emails are already saved on your email provider’s servers! Just enter you IMAP settings into the Evolution email program once you’ve installed Ubuntu Linux, and your emails should automatically reappear.
If you’ve been utilizing less flexible options like POP, then you’ll need to create backups of your emails. Unfortunately, many email managers in Windows don’t create backups of email messages in Linux-friendly formats. To circumvent this inconvenience, I advise that you install the Windows version of the free Thunderbird email manager. While not my favorite email program, Thunderbird does come with an excellent built-in import/export tool. You can use that tool to convert your emails into the Linux-friendly .mbox format.

Microsoft Outlook and Linux’s Evolution are both personal information managers (PIM). This means that they have calendaring capabilities, among other capabilities. If you’ve been using Microsoft Outlook’s calendaring features and you want to export your calendar to Evolution’s calendar, I have a possible solution for you! Thunderbird does not have a calendaring feature, so you’ll need to use Google Calendar as a go-between instead. The following is a slightly-simplified version of this entry in Google’s help documentation:
                           
Export from Microsoft Outlook to Google Calendar

1. Create a Google Calendar
2. Open Microsoft Outlook.
3. Select File, Import and Export and the  Export to a file.
4. Use the Comma Separated Values (Windows) option.
5. Select the calendar you want to export and save it to the location of your choice. Then click Finished.
6. Select the desired date range of events to export. Then click OK.
7. Open Google Calendar.
8. At the top of the calendar list on the left, click the Add down-arrow button and select Import Calendar.
9. Click Browse and select the appropriate file. Then select Open.
10. From the drop-down menu, select the calendar to which you'd like to import events. Then click Import to complete the import.

Additional notes from Google on the importing process:

“When exporting more than one year's worth of data, we recommend that you divide your calendar into multiple, one-year segments and export each file separately… The exported file doesn't support recurring Outlook events. Individual items will be created for recurring events that fall between the dates you've selected.”

This is how you'll export your favorites from Internet Explorer 7.

Now that you’ve finished with your emails and other related information, don’t forget to create a backup file for your Internet favorites. Let’s assume that you’ve been using Internet Explorer. Just export your favorites and save the resulting file to your backup media. If you’re unsure of how to export favorites from your version of Internet Explorer, please consult the instructions found here.