IT Professionals

Do You Back Up Your Gmail?

Posted by on Aug 11, 2008 | 7 Comments

Do you back up your email? What about your Gmail account? If you use it like most people do and place any level of importance, you darn well better. Yet again, an example as to why placing all of your trust into online applications without any real localized backup is just begging for trouble.

Let me ask you this, when is the last time Mozilla banned someone from using Thunderbird a certain way? Heck, even ISP email accounts are not this vague, right? Maybe I am being overly sensitive to this whole thing, but I do not like having my data messed with when the reason as to why the user is being locked out is not even close to clear.

So do you back up your Gmail? Might want to consider it as you really never know when the Gmail system might opt to get twitchy and just disable your account. Thankfully for me, I have been careful. But based on what I am hearing over and over, it might not be enough. Hmm, I wonder if other services such as Hotmail and Yahoo! are as paranoid?

  • http://www.donsalva.com/blog/ Don Salva

    The reason they do that pretty much is the illegal filesharer’s fault.

    Because recently more and more people keep sharing their g-mail account for file sharing.

    Person A uploads FileGame to it and Person B downloads it.

    With 7GB file storage that’s pretty darn sweet. Of course there are those 1-click-hosters like rapidshare.com or upload.to but they have bandwidth restrictions, don’t they?

  • http://www.justcallmatt.net/ Matt Wilkinson

    Hey Matt H, Matt W here.

    I recently moved my biz e-mail to Google and access via IMAP. Because I have a healthy dose of fear and paranoia about my data, I do backup my Google Apps hosted e-mail. I actually employ a couple different techniques to do this, but suffice it to say, if Google did something goofy, I still have all my e-mail data.

    Matt W.

  • http://lockergnome.com/omnidragon OmniDragon

    Yeah, I always back up my Gmail. I usually back it up to another email account online somewhere else. Plus I use Time Machine to backup to an external hd.

  • http://www.goretsky.com/ Aryeh Goretsky

    Hello,

    I download my Gmail via POP3S to a desktop client, and then periodically back up the saved mail to an external hard disk drive (daily), DVD-RAM and tape (weekly or less, depending upon the amount of new data). So far, this process seems to work for me.

    Regards,

    Aryeh Goretsky

  • Steve

    At least every couple of weeks I use a POP3 outlook account to grab all my GMail. This grabs all the “important” emails that I want to archieve on my server in a PST file. This seems to work well.

  • http://www.justcallmatt.net/ Matt Wilkinson
  • Eli

    How do you back-up gmail to another online account?