A few years ago, I moved off of Office 365 and Outlook and onto Gmail. Many of you thought I'd regret the move, but I have to tell you that Gmail has been a nearly frictionless experience. I don't think I'd ever go back to using a standalone email application. In fact, I'm moving as many applications as I can to the cloud, just because of the seamless benefits that provides.
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Many of you asked the one question that did have me a bit bothered: How to do backups of a Gmail account? While Google has a strong track record of managing data, the fact remains that accounts could be hacked, and the possibility does exist that someone could get locked out of a Gmail account.
Many of us have years of mission-critical business and personal history in our Gmail archives, and it's a good idea to have a plan for making regular backups. In this article (and its accompanying gallery), I will discuss a number of excellent approaches for backing up your Gmail data.
By the way, I'm distinguishing Gmail from G Suite, because there are a wide range of G Suite solutions. Even though Gmail is the consumer offering, so many of us use Gmail as our hub for all things, that it makes sense to discuss Gmail on its own merits.
Overall, there are three main approaches: On-the-fly forwarding, download-and-archive, and periodic or one-time backup snapshots. I'll discuss each approach in turn.
Perhaps the easiest method of backup, if less secure or complete than the others, is the on-the-fly forwarding approach. The idea here is that every message that comes into Gmail is then forwarded or processed in some way, ensuring its availability as an archive.
Before discussing the details about how this works, let's cover some of the disadvantages. First, unless you start doing this as soon as you begin your Gmail usage, you will not have a complete backup. You'll only have a backup of flow going forward.
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Second, while incoming mail can be preserved in another storage mechanism, none of your outgoing email messages will be archived. Gmail doesn't have an "on send" filter.
Finally, there are many security issues involved with sending email messages to other sources, often in open and unencrypted text format.
Those considerations aside, it's a way to go.
The very easiest of these mechanisms is to set up a filter in Gmail. Set it to forward all your email to another email account on some other service. There you go. Done.
One easy way I grab all incoming mail to my corporate domain is using a G Suite account. My company-related email comes into the G Suite account, a filter is applied, and that email is sent on its way to my main Gmail account.
This provides two benefits. First, I keep a copy in a second Google account and, for $5/mo, I get pretty good support from Google. The disadvantage of this, speaking personally, is only one of my many email addresses is archived using this method, and no mail I send is stored. I also can't quite get over the fact that I'm buying G Suite and larger businesses get unlimited storage, but because my small business doesn't need five accounts, I don't.