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Comment by GvS | Hacker News Reader

Google+ makes getting backup of all your data really easy (https://www.google.com/takeout/). I'm really worried about Google horror stories but I like using their services, so I'll just settle with doing regular backups.

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Sounds like a great service. Then I went to use it... it doesn't backup email?! I got my contacts and some random stuff that I didn't know I had (and don't care about). But where's my couple of gigs of email? Is there a different service for that?

They provide IMAP and POP to let you download your email.

IMAP is horribly unreliable. POP discards information.

IMAP also discards information - I don't just want my email, I want my tagged email.

once you have it locally you have all the time in the world to retag it.

Yeah, because manually re-entering data that exists already is just what a geek wants to do with the next few months of their life.

Not.

i'm just saying that it's not the same order of problem as not having the mail at all. also, the majority of my tags are applied using filter rules, which are relatively easy to duplicate on an offline archive.

I'd say it's a bigger order of problem than not having the mail at all. I have mounds of inadequately organized information. I don't want to add to the amount of noise I have to sort through.

How is IMAP unreliable for backups?

If you want to keep the tags, take a look at heliotrope[1], a personal email server with tag support that can sync Gmail accounts.

[1]: https://github.com/wmorgan/heliotrope

I should say Thunderbird. Its IMAP implementation has always had issues downloading large volumes of mail for me.

I also live in an area where latency is normally measured in seconds, so I think you and everyone downvoting me are living in a slightly different Internet from me.

Heliotrope sounds like it might offer a good alternative without a six hour journey back to civilization.

Why would you use TB for backups? Use something designed for the job, like offlineimap. Well, or Heliotrope, which is brilliant (Sup, the other project by the same author is brilliant too, but it doesn't download, just reads a maildir).

Yeah, just get a mail client and have it fetch your mail using POP. Make sure it runs every once in a while and you will have a backup of your gmail.

There are scripts to do it via IMAP, but it takes a very long time and it's a bit of a pain to set up.

Not at all, it's utterly trivial with something like OfflineIMAP. Of course, depending on the size of your mailbox it'll take a little while for the first synchronisation but after that it's incremental.

Or just use Thunderbird and tell it to download all messages ("synchronization").

Just use an e-mail client:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78799

Gmail only lets you download so many messages at once. It takes a very long time.

Not in IMAP.

I checked out google takeout - but it only lets me backup the services I don't care about. Google for imapgrab. It's a tiny python program and it's as simple as can get.

Reading this link gave me the push I needed to finally backup my gmail. I've been worried about the [probably very low] risk of Google deciding to close my account, but I'm going to take it into my own hands now, and start using Gmail as my reader only.

http://www.dataliberation.org/ has methods for retrieving pretty much all of your google data.

Don't you have to log in to use it? So this would be something you use before you're blocked.

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