Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
baecher.dev
Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
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Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#2Gmail takeouts come in an arbitrarily-ordered mbox file; I wanted something a bit more backup friendly so I created a small tool for that purpose and wrote about it.
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#3Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago?
I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#4Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
I've enjoyed digging up an old flight itinerary to see how much I paid back in 2015 or just looking at the messages a company replied in support and realizing I'm not buying from them again because they didn't fix the problem.
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#5Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
> Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
What's the advantage to deleting? It's easy to ignore anything old and disk space is cheap. Do you delete old photos?
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#6> if you want to back this file up regularly with something like restic, then you will quickly end up in a world of pain: since new mails are not even appended to the end of the file, each cycle of takeout-then-backup essentially produces a new giant file.
As I'm sure the author is aware, Restic will do hash-based chunking so that similar files can be efficiently be backed up.
How similar are two successive Takeout mboxes?
If the order of messages within an mbox is stable, and new emails are inserted somewhere, the delta update might be tiny.
Even if the order of the mbox's messages are ~random, Restic's delta updates will forego large attachments.
It would be great to see empirical figures here: how large is the incremental backup after after a month's emails. How does that compare for each backup strategy?
The pro of sticking with restic is simplicity, and also avoiding the risk of your tool managing to screw up the data.
This risk isn't so bad if it's a mature tool that canonicalises mboxes (e.g. order them by time), but seems risky for something handrolled.
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#7Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
How strictly do you define need? I've been living as an adult long enough that there have been countless times I've searched for photos and emails from one or two decades ago. I distinctly remember the first time I met an Inbox Zero person. It was so important to her to militantly delete everything she had dealt with, and to me, the disadvantages from that practice far outweigh the advantages.
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#8Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
How strictly do you define need? I've been living as an adult long enough that there have been countless times I've searched for photos and emails from one or two decades ago. I distinctly remember the first time I met an Inbox Zero person. It was so important to her to militantly delete everything she had dealt with, and to me, the disadvantages from that practice far outweigh the advantages.
Inbox Zero just means to deal with messages as they come in, then move them out of the inbox, generally to an archive section.
If she was hard-deleting everything, she wasn't just Inbox Zero, she was F---s Zero, too.
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#9Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
I have, but very rarely. I could count on one hand how often I’ve needed to dig back more than half a decade ago.
Back when I used Gmail I just kept everything personal and work related but when I moved away and started paying for email storage I took a different approach. It didn’t make sense for me to pay considerably more storage for something I almost never use.
I ended up backing up all of my emails outside of the last 5 years and stored them on an offline drive where I can reference them as eml files if I ever need it.
Going forward once a year I’ll export and purge the oldest year in my account.
Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts
#10Serious question: have you ever needed an email from even 5 years ago? I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
I've enjoyed digging up an old flight itinerary to see how much I paid back in 2015 or just looking at the messages a company replied in support and realizing I'm not buying from them again because they didn't fix the problem.
Looking up how much things used to cost? I too like being depressed.