Back up Gmail to a local drive - mcdonnellturper

Charles Johnson has a "ill-natured worry" or so all those important messages stored in Gmail. He asked if in that respect's a way to aft them up locally to his hard drive.

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Although many people are comfortable keeping data only in the cloud, I'm non unity of them. I'm indisputable that Google backs up regularly, and keeps my data connected quaternate servers. But I still finger bettor keeping a local copy of my ain.

Only how do you do that?

The obvious solution is to use Pop up or IMAP to admittance your mail through a local anaesthetic mail customer–such as Lookout. But that won't choke off all the messages you've stored in Gmail over past years.

That's why I'm recommending Gmail Backup. This free political program hasn't been updated in closely three years, but it still works fine.

Once you've installed and launched Gmail Computer backup, you fill in a brief form and offse the download. The first download can be quite slow, even if you have a fast Net connection. It took me much than three hours to download a bit more than a GB. It's clearly that my Internet connection wasn't the bottleneck.

Ulterior backups will be faster, of run over. I powerfully suggest you check the Newest emails only pick to score them so.

Gmail Backup saves each subject matter Eastern Samoa a separate .eml file. You can open and read these files in most Microsoft clients, including Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail, only not in Outlook. Windows, by itself, hindquarters look for for text inside .eml files, but information technology can't display these files' contents without one of these programs.

If you get into't have any of these programs, I recommend the free MiTec Mail Viewer. This ISN't a entire mail customer; information technology's solitary job is to help oneself you find and read existing chain armour.

Backup up to .eml files has other drawbacks. You lose the labels that help you mastermind your mail in Gmail. Also, since each message is a separate file, you lose the conversation metaphor that makes Gmail so convenient.

But since you'll only call for these files in an emergency, these shortcomings should ut.

You might as wel want to topically patronage the addresses and phone numbers you've saved in Gmail. For that, see Access Your Gmail Contacts Offline.