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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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Google keep a copy of your mail if your account was deactivated for 6 years? Isn't that asking a bit much considering you were the one that broke the ToS?

Does anyone thing that Google isn't keeping a copy of every bit of data they have on everybody that has ever used any of their systems? I cannot imagine they would ever throw data away. Even if they restrict the end user from it doesn't mean that they destroy the data for their own use.

If a user wishes to delete their account, companies are legally required to delete all data associated with it, at least in many jurisdictions.

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

#122
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To play devil's advocate - you willingly gave it to them, with almost zero contractual expectations. In a technical sense it is their stuff, and they have graciously implemented a feature allowing you to retrieve a copy of it. I definitely agree that it's the "right" thing to do, but this kind of comment speaks of entitlement and lack of personal responsibility. They're offering a service, they don't have any inheren…

A person who lived by this "technical" principle would likely find that their friends no longer wanted to loan them anything. After all, there is no "inherent obligation" for you to return anything, right?

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. The implicit agreement is that they provide a service to hold, manage, and use your stuff, and you give up a certain amount of privacy by allowing them to see it - and they get to advertise at you while you use the service, and maybe make money in other ways off your information. So in other words, it really is your stuff. Imagine if they locked your accounts from you out of malice - it's legal gray a…

Why would you have the expectation of an implicit agreement? There is no implicit agreement, that's an unfounded assumption by the user. I imagine they could completely shut down all unpaid gmail access at any moment with no legal implications (though I haven't read the fine print, and in that extreme case the courts would probably step in just to keep the country running smoothly). What precedent is there to support…

If Google simply shut down Gmail, their stockholders would pretty much fire the entire leadership of the company. It would be professional suicide to approve something like that.

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

#124

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 ac…

Another tool which does a good job is Mailstore, free for home users:

http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home.aspx

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate - you willingly gave it to them, with almost zero contractual expectations. In a technical sense it is their stuff, and they have graciously implemented a feature allowing you to retrieve a copy of it. I definitely agree that it's the "right" thing to do, but this kind of comment speaks of entitlement and lack of personal responsibility. They're offering a service, they don't have any inheren…

A person who lived by this "technical" principle would likely find that their friends no longer wanted to loan them anything. After all, there is no "inherent obligation" for you to return anything, right?

What? Yes, there is, that's what "loan" means.

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

#126
post #99
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use fetchmail -- it loses data. Use offlineimap or mbsync instead.

Citation?

I don't know about lost messages, but it used to bomb out on spam, but still deliver the messages up to the spam. So I would wake up with 5,000 duplicate messages and a lot that were never gotten, and i'd have to use a client to delete whatever seemed like the "bad" message until fetchmail could continue delivering mail and finally delete the old ones.

To solve it I did what any bored Perl programmer would do - write my own fetchmail program in a couple hours in Perl. It solved my issues and i've been using it ever since. Years later it took me about an hour to add SSL IMAP support so I could use it on Gmail and Exchange.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone thing that Google isn't keeping a copy of every bit of data they have on everybody that has ever used any of their systems? I cannot imagine they would ever throw data away. Even if they restrict the end user from it doesn't mean that they destroy the data for their own use.

If a user wishes to delete their account, companies are legally required to delete all data associated with it, at least in many jurisdictions.

Which jurisdictions are those?

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really imo…they are an automated, set-it-and-forget-it backup service. Not quite the same thing for me to have to remember to go in occasionally and download a full copy of my data versus having a service do it for me once or multiple times a day. Especially for businesses who want to manage multiple accounts and have a centralized backup system.

Plus the critical thing here: Backupify has restore. Who wants backup without restore?

You don't need to restore with Gmail.

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

#129
post #56

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 ac…

A similar project is http://gmvault.org/ I'd never heard of bagoma before. I've used Gmvault successfully on both gmail and google apps accounts.

I've never heard of either and just tried out gmvault and it's currently running and appears to be working.

Anybody tried out both and have data to share?

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