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Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#41

Post by crossroadsguy »

LinuxBender wrote: post #17
amelius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you search through old emails easily?

If I import the folder into Thunderbird, yes. The search in Thunderbird is a subjective topic but it works for me. There are probably other tools to search through them but I have never tried to find one.

I wonder if there’s an app that can enable this kind of backup, which when restored or searched can search through all those snapshots and just one and can tell me where that certain email is so that I can just restore only that snapshot.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#42

Post by hagbard_c »

I backup my mail server and with that all email every day, keeping archives for the last 7 days, the last 4 weeks and the last 3 months. I have an email archive going back to 1992, from 1997 it is directly available in MUAs, older messages are in offline archives.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#43

Post by hagbard_c »

LinuxBender wrote: post #10

Do you backup your Emails? Yes. I have a combination of self hosted email and a vendor email provider. I access both with IMAPS. I pull down the emails with Thunderbird and never leave them on the server. I back up the local Thunderbird data folder locally then back it up to multiple encrypted SSD/NVME.

Why don't you leave your mail on your own server? I self-host (on the server-under-the-stairs here on the farm) as well and always leave mail on the server so I can access it from any client anywhere in the world. Assuming you're actually self-hosting as in 'running your own services on your own hardware at your own location' pulling it from the server doesn't make sense since you're just moving data from one of your drives to another. If you're 'self-hosting' on a VPS I can see why you'd do that but I don't consider this to be 'total' self-hosting since you're using hardware outside of your own control.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#46

Post by LinuxBender »

hagbard_c wrote: post #43
LinuxBender wrote: post #10

Do you backup your Emails? Yes. I have a combination of self hosted email and a vendor email provider. I access both with IMAPS. I pull down the emails with Thunderbird and never leave them on the server. I back up the local Thunderbird data folder locally then back it up to multiple encrypted SSD/NVME.

Why don't you leave your mail on your own server? I self-host (on the server-under-the-stairs here on the farm) as well and always leave mail on the server so I can access it from any client anywhere in the world. Assuming you're actually self-hosting as in 'running your own services on your own hardware at your own location' pulling it from the server doesn't make sense since you're just moving data from one of your…

My preference. I don't really go anywhere so around the world is not required for me. It also means that when either my self hosted solution or the commercial solution gets popped there is nothing to leak. My emails are not exposed to the internet 99.99% of the time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#49

Post by sillystuff »

I use offlineimap to sync several email accounts both to local storage, and to accounts on other free email providers. E.g., a gmail account dedicated to bug reporting is replicated by offlineimap to an outlook.com account.

Address books and calendars for random gmail accounts get synced by vdirsyncer to both local storage and also to other backup gmail accounts.

It works well, and I don't have to worry about e.g., Google permanently locking me out of one of these accounts, without recourse.

* Both offlineimap and vdirsyncer are in Debian's repos. But, I had to pin/install vdirsyncer from testing to get working oath support for gmail (it did not pull in any dependencies from testing that were concerning [I don't recall if it pulled in anything at all, but I would not have installed from testing if it pulled in anything concerning]).

Re: Ask HN: Do you backup your Emails?

#50

Post by crossroadsguy »

subsection1h wrote: post #40
crossroadsguy wrote: post #38

My mail provider does some kind of periodic backup which they do out of their own goodness of heart even though they don’t have to (that what they say). I save important official docs from my mail — I even sometimes export eml files to those archive/backup folders. So all those get backed up. The emails themselves? Not really — even though the mail folder (Thunderbird’s; not Mail.app’s — can’t trust an Apple made uti…

If you use Thunderbird and want to store your emails "in an email file format that's most efficient for backup and querying that backup later", have you considered switching from mbox (Thunderbird's default mail format) to maildir (each email stored in its own file)? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Maildir Note: Thunderbird lacks full support for maildir.…

I had thought of doing it last time. Thunderbird documentation makes this so scary that I ended up just leaving it be.
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