Technofriends

If you do most of your email communication over Gmail, taking a backup of your Gmail account and being able to restore it at your ease in times of need, makes good sense. This article introduces you to Gmail Backup, a freeware which can help you achieve the above mentioned goals.

Gmail Backup is an interesting program aimed backing up and restoring your Gmail mailbox. In order to use Gmail Backup, you will need to activate the IMAP access on your Gmail account mailbox.

The email messages downloaded as part of the backup are stored in a local directory in files whose names follow a specific format YYYYMMDD-hhmmss-nn.eml . In case there are more e-mails with the same timestamp there is the number nn which starts with value 1. Label assignment is stored in the file labels.txt which is the plain text file and it pairs the e-mails stored in the file described above with the assigned labels.

As Gmail Backup stores the backup of emails in standard EML files, downloaded email messages can be opened with your e-mail client (MS Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird) . Thus, attachments are also displayed in “normal” emails.

In order to perform full backup of your GMail account into directory dir, use:

gmail-backup.exe backup dir user@gmail.com password

To specify time interval, you can also add additional date specification in the format YYYYMMDD. The second date can be ommited in which case the backup is from the first date to now: 

gmail-backup.exe backup dir user@gmail.com password 20071231 20081231

Using Gmail Backup, You can even do multiple backups into the same directory. The labels.txt is updated according the new e-mails not in the previous backup. If you wish to restore earlier created backup, use the restore command.

To restore your GMail account from the previous backup in the directory dir, use the following command

gmail-backup.exe restore dir user@gmail.com password

If you wish to clear up your inbox, in scenario where you would like to discontinue using Gmail, use the special clear command pattern as shown below.
gmail-backup.exe clear user@gmail.com password

The software will ask you to repeat the username, so you have the chance to cancel your mistake.

Gmail Backup is a Freeware and is available for both Windows and Linux. Download Gmail Backup.

 

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vaibhav1981

Do stay tuned to Technofriends for more, one of the best ways of doing so is by subscribing to our feeds. You can subscribe to Technofriends feed by clicking here.

Related posts:

1. Backup your Gmail Account.
2. What is OpenID and how to use your Gmail account as OpenID.
3. Backup Windows Device Drivers with DriverBackup! 2
4. How To Integrate your Google Calendar with Gmail Account
5. Some more Gmail Hacks