How to Back Up Your Microsoft Publisher Files

Microsoft Publisher's retirement does not delete the files on your computer. The risk is quieter: the only copy of ten years of bulletins lives on one aging Windows PC, in a format fewer programs can open each year. A backup is not the same as a conversion, and a conversion is not a substitute for keeping the originals. You want both.

This is a preservation task. It applies to churches, PTAs, small offices, and anyone who has a folder of .pub flyers they might need again.

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What You Are Protecting Against

Three separate failures show up in real offices:

The computer fails. A dead hard drive, a stolen laptop, or a PC that was wiped during an IT refresh takes the only copy of Sunday Bulletin.pub with it.

The application goes away. Publisher may still launch on the machine where it is already installed. New PCs, Microsoft 365 in a browser, and volunteers' Macs will not. If the .pub file is your only copy, you cannot open it when that install is gone. See what happens to Publisher files after October 2026.

The file itself goes bad. Publisher documents can fail to open after a crash, a partial copy, or years on a failing disk. Recovering data from corrupted Publisher files is much harder than restoring a known-good copy.

A backup plan addresses all three: extra copies of the original .pub files, plus copies in formats you can still open.

Step 1: Find Every Publisher File

Search rather than relying on memory. On Windows, search *.pub from File Explorer. Look in:

Documents and Desktop
Downloads
Folders named for bulletins, newsletters, liturgies, or events
Shared drives, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive (files can sit there without being openable)
USB sticks in a desk drawer and "archive" external drives
Old office PCs that still boot

Include templates. A file named Bulletin MASTER.pub is often more valuable than any single week's output. Publisher templates after retirement covers what to do with those specifically.

Copy the files into one holding folder first, keeping subfolders so you can see where each file came from. Do not skip files that look like duplicates until you have compared dates and file sizes.

Step 2: Copy the Originals as They Are

Keep the .pub files. Conversion is useful, but it is not a bit-for-bit archive of the original publication. If you ever get access to Publisher again, or to a better converter, the original is the best source.

A simple approach used by many archives:

At least two copies of the .pub files
On two different kinds of storage (for example, the office computer plus an external drive or a cloud folder)
With at least one copy stored somewhere that would survive a fire or theft in the building

You do not need special backup software for a few hundred files. Copying a folder to an external drive and to a cloud account is enough, as long as someone actually does it and a second person knows where the copies live.

Name the backup folder with a date, such as publisher-backup-2026-11-05. When you make a later backup, use a new dated folder instead of silently overwriting, until you are sure the new set is complete.

Step 3: Add Formats You Can Open Without Publisher

Originals protect history. Modern formats protect use.

For each file you still care about, keep:

PDF for reading, printing, and posting
PowerPoint (PPTX) if you expect to change dates, names, or announcements

You do not have to convert every file on day one. Prioritize:

Templates and "master" layouts
Recent bulletins you will reuse next week
Legal, historical, or commemorative issues (building campaigns, pastoral transitions, anniversary services)
The rest of the archive when you have time

Rescuing a church bulletin archive is the conversion-focused companion to this backup article. Batch conversion is there for the third and fourth buckets.

Bulletin Rescue can convert many files in one upload (up to 200 files, 50 MB each, 500 MB total). You get a free watermarked preview of page one. After you unlock access, downloads include PDF and PowerPoint. That download is not a backup by itself: files on the service are deleted 24 hours after upload. Save the ZIP to your own drive. Your original .pub files stay on your computer unchanged.

LibreOffice Draw can open some Publisher files at no cost and export PDF. Complex layouts often shift. It is a fair free option for a handful of simple files; it is a poor only-copy strategy for a large, carefully designed archive. Free vs paid Publisher converters compares those tradeoffs honestly.

Step 4: Store Copies Where Other People Can Find Them

A backup nobody else can find is a single point of failure with extra steps. Write down, in a place the office already uses (a shared drive README, a printed sheet in the file cabinet):

Where the .pub folder lives
Where the PDF/PPTX folder lives
Which cloud account holds a copy
Who has the password or shared-folder access

Use boring filenames: 2025-12-24-christmas-eve-bulletin.pdf, not finalFINAL2.pub. Future volunteers will search by date.

If your church or nonprofit has an IT person or a volunteer who runs OneDrive or Google Drive, ask them to include the Publisher folder in the normal backup of shared files. Cloud sync is not magic—files deleted locally can sync as deletions—but it does protect against a single dead PC.

What Not to Treat as a Backup

Email. A .pub attachment in a sent-mail folder is easy to lose and hard to search. If you emailed a bulletin, save the file into the archive folder as well.

A converter's servers. Online tools, including Bulletin Rescue, keep uploads only briefly. Download promptly.

Screenshots. A photo of the screen is better than nothing for a one-page flyer, but it is not a backup of the publication. You cannot edit it cleanly, and multi-page newsletters become a pile of images.

A single USB stick in the same desk as the PC. That helps if the hard drive dies. It does not help if the building is damaged or the stick is lost.

After the Backup: A Light Maintenance Habit

You do not need a complicated schedule. When you finish a bulletin or flyer:

Save the .pub into the archive folder if you still produce one (many offices will stop).
Save the PDF you actually printed or emailed.
Save the PowerPoint or other working file you will edit next time.
Every few months, copy the archive folder to the external drive.

If you have already moved weekly work into Canva, Google Slides, or Word, keep exporting PDF from those tools into the same dated archive. The goal is a readable history, not loyalty to Publisher.