How to Save Zimbra Emails to Hard Drive Locally – Stepwise Guide

In the following article you can get the best solutions to save Zimbra emails to hard drive without any hassle. Traverse the blog post to get the mechanism to backup Zimbra desktop emails locally.

Understanding the Reason for Zimbra Mailbox Export or Backup

Zimbra is a popular email and collaboration suite that provides features such as email, calendaring, contacts, tasks, and more. There could be several reasons why someone might need to perform a mailbox export in Zimbra:

1. Data Backup: Regularly exporting mailboxes ensures that important emails, contacts, calendars, and other data are backed up. This is crucial to prevent data loss due to accidental deletion, hardware failures, or other unforeseen circumstances.
2. Migration: When migrating from one email platform to another or from one server to another, exporting mailboxes is essential to transfer users’ data seamlessly.
3. Troubleshooting: If a user encounters mailbox-related issues, exporting the mailbox might be part of the troubleshooting process. This allows administrators to examine the mailbox’s contents for any anomalies or corruption.
4. Auditing: Exporting mailboxes can be useful for auditing purposes.
5. Legal and E-Discovery: In legal cases or e-discovery processes, organizations might need to export specific mailboxes to gather evidence or information relevant to a case.

Save or Backup Zimbra Emails on Computer!

You can export account information, including emails and attachments, contacts, calendars, tasks, and briefcase folders, as well as export certain items to your account. You can then save the data as a backup on your computer or elsewhere, or import it into another application.

Zimbra’s desktop import/export feature allows you to export all data for selected accounts, including emails and attachments, contacts, calendars, tasks, etc., or certain information such as email account contact lists or calendars. It then Export the data to another account on Zimbra Desktop. The account information is saved as a tar-gzip(tgz) file so that it can be imported into other accounts on the desktop. You can also use the Export/Import feature to save your personal account information as a backup to your computer or other location.

Note: While exporting contacts, it gets save in .csv file. Individual calendar folders are saved as .ics files.

Steps to Save Zimbra Emails to Hard Drive

To export Zimbra emails you can select the Preferences option >> Import / Export page.

Export Options

• Export all the account data including messages and attachments, calendar, and contact.
• Select Advanced settings to export specific account data
• Export Calendar
• Export Contacts

Quick Steps to Export All Your Mailbox Data

1. Firstly, Go to Preferences ⇒ Import/Export
2. Then, in Export, select the Type as Account
3. Then, make sure Source displays All folders.
4. After that, click Export.
5. In the dialog that opens, select Save File and select where to save the file.

All the account data is saved in .tgz file.

How to Save Zimbra Emails to Hard Drive – Watch Video

Use Advanced Settings to Export Specific Data

1. Go to Preferences ⇒ Import / Export.
2. In Export, select the Type as Account.
3. Then, in the Source field, select the folder to export.
   If Source is All folders, then, the data types field can be used to filter data by the folder type. If Source is a specific folder, then, the data type does not matters.
4. After that, to select data by date, enter a start and end date. Only data between these dates are exported.
5. Then, if you want to search for specific information, enter the search query in the Search filter.  Then, only data that matches that query will get exported.
6. In Other, check Only export content files, exclude meta data when the data is being exported into a non-Zimbra email account.
7. Click Export.
8. Finally, in the dialog box that opens, select the Save File and select the destination to save the file.

Check out the File Format of the Saved Files:

• Every message is exported as a .eml file
• Each contacts is exported as  a.vcf file
• Each Calendar will get exported as  a.appt.meta file

Exporting a Calendar

1. Go to Preferences ⇒ Import/Export.
2. In Export, select the Type as Calendar.
3. Then, in the Source field select the calendar to export.
4. Click Export.
5. Then, in the dialog that opens, select Save File and select where to save the file.

After completing the process to save Zimbra emails to hard drive. The calendar will get saved as an .ics file that can be imported into any calendar application that supports .ics.

Exporting Contact Lists

1. Go to Preferences ⇒ Import/Export.
2. In Export, select the Type as Contacts.
3. Then, select the contact format to export the contact file as:
   • Windows Live Contacts
   • Outlook contacts
   • Account contacts
   • Thunderbird
   • Outlook 2003
   • Yahoo contacts
4. In the Source select the contact list to export.
5. Then, click Export.
6. In the dialog that opens, select Save File and select where to save the file.

The contacts file is saved in .csv file, with the contact information organized for the format you selected.

How to Extract Zimbra TGZ or TAR file ?

After exporting the Zimbra mailbox as a TGZ file, you can easily extract the TGZ or TAR file using the following steps.

1. Download and run zExtractor to save Zimbra emails to hard drive. Click the Add File or Add Folder option to browse Zimbra exported TGZ files / folders, then click Open to load the file into the software panel.
2. All folders are displayed in the software area. After that, select all or required folders, contacts and calendars.
3. The zExtractor provides a number of advanced options for extracting data from the Zimbra TGZ. Then, use the “Change” option to extract all folders, contacts and calendars separately to select the target path.
4. Then click the “Extract” button to continue the Zimbra TGZ extraction process.

Now that you have extracted the data from the Zimbra TGZ file, you can convert the Zimbra message to the desired file type as needed.

A Single Tool to Migrate Exported Zimbra FIle Data

The Final Words

These are the methods to backup email Zimbra desktop. The zExtractor tool is a remarkable and effective software that provides the direct method to save Zimbra emails to hard drive. By using this utility, one can easily extract Zimbra TGZ. If you want to export Zimbra TGZ data to other email client supported formats such as PST, MBOX, PDF, EML, DOC, NSF etc. Then Use zMigrator Moreover the tool provides various technical options for saving the Zimbra emails server database including the cloud migration, such as Zimbra Mailboxes to Office 365 Migration.