Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts • Hacker News Board

Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts

#61

Post by SanjayMehta » Tue, Dec 30, 2025, 10:17 PM UTC

ifh-hn wrote: post #55

SanjayMehta wrote: post #3

Serious 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.

Despite your down votes I'm completely in agreement. Emails and chat are transient and expire. Unless I need to keep it for, like you say, a good reason, then it's deleted.

The downvotes are due to my name. I have a fan club for pointing out hypocrisy in the past.

Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts

#62

Post by faust201 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:49 AM UTC

nutjob2 wrote: post #58

marwis wrote: post #29

Isn't it easier to just backup via IMAP to maildir versioned with git? Does takeout include any metadata not accessible via IMAP? Does it even include labels?

I've read somewhere that a GMail user was banned or the like for using IMAP for backups, trying to find the reference...

Total BS. Lots of people use Thunderbird IMAP for Gmail.

Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts

#63

Post by Cockbrand » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

Not sure if I'm missing something when I look at the discussion here, but there's Got Your Back [0], which backs up all emails in a Gmail account as .eml files.

This seems to be the easiest and most straightforward way for me.

[0] https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back

Re: Incremental Backups of Gmail Takeouts

#64

Post by actuallyalys » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 12:39 AM UTC

faust201 wrote: post #62

nutjob2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read somewhere that a GMail user was banned or the like for using IMAP for backups, trying to find the reference...

Total BS. Lots of people use Thunderbird IMAP for Gmail.

I think you're right that it's very unlikely to be a common thing. However, so many people use Gmail (including with setups like Thunderbird like you note) that it's totally possible someone really did get banned due to a total fluke.