Do you backup your Gmail? What if you account were hacked into? What if Google deleted your account? More recently Gmail has been completely unavailable and I have had a 502 error. This has made me nervous and worried about the stability of the service.
I save almost all of my emails and have thousands of items stored in gmail. I would be devastated if I lost all of this data.
I’ve been backing up Gmail for almost a year now. I use two methods for this; pop email and fetch via cygwin. The first method is easier to set-up but I prefer the second because I can set it as a scheduled task and don’t have to think about retrieving the email. Today, however, I am going to discuss the first method.
Enable POP in Gmail.
- Within gmail go to Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP
- Select the first option in the POP Download section. This says “Enable POP for all email (even email that has already been downloaded).
- Under “When Messages Are Accessed with POP”, I have it set to “Keep Gmail’s Copy in the Inbox”. You may want to change this to Archive but I don’t recommend using the delete option. You want to use POP as a backup, not as a replacement.
Now you will want to set up your email program to retrieve your gmail via pop. I use Thunderbird to do this. Google provides instructions for almost every desktop email program as well as the Blackberry and iPhone.
There are some minor problems with this method:
- I have to actually open Thunderbird to backup my email. I don’t use a desktop email program on a regular basis, so I am not in the habit of running it while I am working. Gmail is always open but Thunderbird isn’t. If I don’t actually open Thunderbird then the email isn’t retrieved and therefore not backed up.
- Make sure your email program options are set to leave a copy of the email on the server. Otherwise you will be downloading the email to a new location but not exactly backing it up if you don’t leave it within Gmail.
- Gmail will only allow you to retrieve 350-400 messages at one time. If you have thousands, it may take mutliple passes to download all of you stored email.
- When I first set this up, I already had POP enabled in my Gmail settings. On the first attempt to download my messages, only the unread ones were retrieved rather than everything, which was what I anticiapted. To correct this, disable the POP setting from within Gmail and save. Go back to the Gmail POP settings and enable. This sort of resets it and Gmail will once again start retrieving everything that is stored.
- Items in the spam and trash folder will not be downloaded. This shouldn’t be a problem unless you filter items to the trash that you want stored for 30 days.
One thing that I do like about this backup system is that this gmail backup is backed up yet again with my scheduled backups to an external drive. The email data is stored in the Thunderbird folder within Application Data directory, which one of the two directories that I backup on a daily and weekly basis.
Do you use gmail? Do you store a lot of information in it? Have you ever thought about losing that data? What would you do? If you use gmail and have a backup plan for it, please tell me how you do this.
melted server photo credit: Topato
I have never performed a backup of Gmail. Never actually thought that it might go down. But recently , lots of users are having errors with gmail. It is better to back up all the mails.
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I ha a situation a couple of years back where I was locked out of my GMail account altogether. It was very scary because the allure of GMail is being able to keep everything in one place and search it easily.
Here’s how I’m handling my GMail backups. Since I wrote this, I also have a Blackberry, which makes synching with Outlook or whatever client nice, but I still don’t use a desktop client anymore. It’s much easier to have it all in the cloud where I can find it.
However, I’m leery of giving google all the control, so I have another account with a different provider that receives forwards of everything received and sent from GMail.
http://www.drumsnwhistles.com/2006/07/14/good-google-news/
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@Madhur – Gmail has been unstable lately and the 502 errors frighten me. For a long time I completely trusted in google to take care of my email but I don’t anymore and I’m glad I have a backup plan. Since gmail has so much storage space, I keep everything. I have thousands and thousands of emails including my sent ones.
If you start a backup plan, let me know what you decide to do. Also, if you enjoying tinkering with the command line, you might enjoy the automated fetch solution that I am planning on writing about next week.
@Karoli – Thanks so much for reading and commenting. I’m glad to know that I’m not just paranoid and that other people don’t blindly trust google with their data. And thanks for sharing the article – I’m glad that ultimately the problem was resolved. Forwarding the email to another account is also a good idea and one that I hadn’t considered. I just store so much in gmail that I might run into space issues.
The directory where my Thunderbird email is stored on my hard drive is also backed up to an external drive on a daily and weekly basis. The weekly backup is stored in my office (away from home) during the week. So, I guess I have things backed up in 3-4 locations.
Since the first day I had a gmail account I forwarded everything to my regular email in outlook.
That way I get every message as they arrive (outlook is always open on my second monitor) and also have use gmail as the ‘backup’ for said mails.
I’ve had gmail since the first invites came out and don’t recall ever having any issues with it so not sure why you were getting a 502??
@Scam – When you forward everything to your regular email is all the header information retained. Or does everything show as being from you? Part of my backup issues is that I want all the original header information such as from, date, etc. retained. I also don’t like using my regular email – it’s existed for too long and it an enormous spam repository.
I didn’t have any issues until recently. But it’s been wonky lately. Others have noticed the same problems. You say you have Outlook open but do you have gmail open? If not, maybe that is why you aren’t noticing the errors. It is almost always open in my browser.
I start using my real name and you still call me ‘Scam’ – I guess the branding does work after all! ;)
Yes, I do get all the headers intact after forwarding so no issues there, though I can’t say that I ever login to gmail directly these days – there’s no need to.
Lees last blog post – Recent Email Scams
Lee (or is it Joanna),
I think it’s just habit :-) Plus I just did a complicated WordPress upgrade for someone – it went well but my head is swimming.
Well, see, there is a reason to login to gmail if you access personal email from work ;-) Plus I don’t like standalone email applications, especially Outlook. I backup with Thunderbird but otherwise don’t use it.
But we all have different ways of getting our work done. It’s interesting to learn the different methods people use for backing up.
Joanna? Do I look like a woman??? :D
How can a WordPress upgrade be complicated? It’s normally just a few clicks and you’re all done.
Lees last blog post – Recent Email Scams
Oh they can be. How many have you done?
This was from a very old version to the most current version. There was a code dependency on a plugin that hasn’t been upgraded and doesn’t work anymore. It’s also frightening when it’s for someone else – I don’t mind mucking up my own site but not someone elses site. I also ran into an odd issue where the database backup was a blank file.
I’ve done upgrades for around 30 sites, several of those more than once. Admittedly they have never been older than the previous version which may have made a huge difference.
Lees last blog post – Recent Email Scams
Interesting.
The photo that you used for this post is at least as interesting as the text. :)
I actually don’t place that much importance on email. I don’t save most of it – I treat it as verbal conversation basically.
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Vered – The photo is great. The computer was in a fire and the blob on the top is a completely melted telephone.
I can be too obsessive about saving digital information so sometimes I think it would be nice to feel the way you do about email.
Nice trick. I also back up my email and I use your trick. being paranoid is one of strongest point! LOL!!! anyway it is always good to have a back up of your most important email. in the Gmail i have all the emails i exchanged with my wife at the time when we where boyfriend and girlfriend!
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@google tricks – Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I’m paranoid about losing my email too. You definitely don’t want to lose the emails between you and your wife – you know printing them out and putting them into a book would be a great anniversary gift for her :-)