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Your whole account or just the email part? If you have a real email client, you could rescue your email from it even if your account is toast. If just the webmail part goes down permanently, you can download your mailbox from https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

Creating the archive takes some time and is it working during a Gmail outage anyway?

For OS X users, CloudPull (payware) is a good solution for a continuous Gmail backup. It's developed by Golden Hill Software:

http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/

No Takeout was affected by the outage as well unfortunately.

Thanks, good to know!

I still have my Gmail account hooked into Thunderbird. I don't actually use it to check my mail, but it keeps pulling it all down, so if Google's servers all catch fire, I lose nothing.

Occasionally download a complete backup from https://www.google.com/settings/datatools to your harddrive.