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Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

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Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#32
Here is the simplest solution I found to taking a backup of your gmail. The only glitch is that the mirror account will of course be a perfect image only if you set up the forwarding from day one :-(

I had to use gmvault (gmvault.org/) to make a copy of my gmail; it was quite doable.

Pasted from http://www.webmonkey.com/2008/11/simple_solutions_to_help_yo...

"Create some backup accounts — This one is so obvious I’m always surprised to hear that not everyone does it. Gmail is free and lets you have an unlimited number accounts… so open a second one. Mine is just my usual account with .bak appended to the username. Once that’s set up, login to your primary account and either enable forwarding for all messages (Settings >> Forwarding and POP/IMAP) or create filters to only forward the messages you really care about. Then just send those messages on to the backup account.

I use my main Gmail account to manage five e-mail addresses, so I used the filters method and only back up a couple of them (the others are already backed up on the original domain’s mail server). I also have the forwarding set up to pass messages along to a Yahoo Mail account, an account on my own server and even a good old Hotmail account (or Windows Live Mail as it’s known these days).

This setup is like a good investment portfolio, think of it as e-mail diversification — your’re hedging your bets by spreading your mail around to several servers. If something goes wrong on one account, just login to another. I don’t login to the other accounts much, so they aren’t as carefully filtered, organized and de-spammed as my main Gmail account, but at least my mail is there"

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so you weren't backing up your email account?

Wait, how many people back up their gmail account?

As a google apps admin for my work I backup the entire domain's emails - there are a bunch of companies offering this as a service these days.

As a personal google mail user I use offlineimap to synchronise with a local maildir for both redundancy and reading my emails.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#35
Mbox, eh? Can anyone confirm that they've implemented this properly, particularly when it comes to escaping lines in message bodies that start with "From "? Failure to properly escape such lines was an infamous bug with Mail.app's mbox exporter[1].

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070329131522/http://diveintomar...

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how many people back up their gmail account?

raises hand http://gmvault.org/ How does anyone get upset when something they're not paying for stops working?

You definitely pay for gmail. Paraphrasing Heinlein, you pay for it other than with money.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

raises hand http://gmvault.org/ How does anyone get upset when something they're not paying for stops working?

You definitely pay for gmail. Paraphrasing Heinlein, you pay for it other than with money.

I'm okay with that. It hasn't cost me anything I valued.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#38

This is great news. Unfortunately downloading my Gmail content isn't listed as an option. I hope this isn't another case of Google App accounts not getting new features.

We are rolling this feature out slowly, right now only about 1% of people have access to Takeout's of GMail. But we hope to increase it to 100%, including Google Apps accounts (if your administrator hasn't blocked it) over the next couple weeks.

I'm wondering how mbox format is going to work for 20+ gigabytes of email. Am I seriously going to be presented with a multi-gigabyte-sized text file?

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#39
For anyone looking to an alternative method, there is a great open source Python script called Bagoma that incrementally backs up your Gmail account: http://bagoma.sourceforge.net/ . Each email is stored as an individual text file rather than the mbox format. I have backed up my account with it every few days for a couple of years and it works great. It will even restore your account to Gmail if you need to switch accounts or accidentally delete messages.

Re: Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data

#40
post #26
post #5

Thank you, Google. Glad to hear that the Data Liberation Front is alive and well: http://www.dataliberation.org/ From 2006: "We would never trap user data," he [Schmidt] said. [1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-we-wou...

I have ambivalent feelings about this. All in all, this is my stuff.

Agreed but it takes time, effort and money to make sure that you can take your stuff with you.
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