GMail Backup

A few weeks ago about 150,000 people lost access to thier GMail emails. GMail slowly restored the email and although they had no SLA to do so (free accounts) it was thier reputation on the line.

I host all my Domains with Google Apps (the free version) so i also heavily rely on Google, except that it still appears as my domain rather than gmail.com.

Google are reliable most of the time, but because you have no SLA with the free version of GMail you are relying purely on thier good will.

However there are many ways of backing up GMail, especially with POP and IMAP access.

However the best tool i have found so far is GMail Backup www.gmail-backup.com. Its Freeware/Donateware, although i do suggest you help out the author so that the tool continues to evolve.

What i really like about it, is that it runs under Windows 2008 Server too in addition to other versions of Windows, Linux and Mac. But the best part is that you can invoke it as a command line. So you can now easily schedule a Gmail Backup every one day or in my case, every 6 hours and truely forget about it. It even creates a file which shows which were the newer emails it backed up.

It even allows restoring of the emails back to your GMail account or any other GMail account.

And for thoes who dont like the command line, they do have a GUI, but obviously you cannot schedule the GUI, however the command line is a very simple single line command which simply needs to be invoked to start a backup.

Further backups are all incremental, following the first full backup.

I now have a proper scheduled Gmail backup for all my various GMail App accounts and for once i can forget about worrying if my email in the cloud is safe.

Remember just because you put it into the cloud, does not mean you dont need to back it up, especially when you consider free versions which have no SLA such as GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

So go on, do a dialy backup of your GMail before its too late.