13 Mar 2011
Every so often I have a minor freakout when I realize the amount of data that’s stored in my Gmail account. The first thing I do is make my Google account password longer and add more obscure characters. Then, I feel slightly nervous that it’s stored in the US and subject to who-knows-what laws.
Once those feelings pass, I’m mostly concerned that due to <unforseen circumstance> I might lose access to everything that’s in there. It would be a massive hassle.
Fortunately, Gmail supports IMAP access to the mail so it should be relatively straightforward to back up everything. I finally got around to doing that today. I ended up using “offlineimap” which does what its name implies.
First, install offlineimap. On Ubuntu, this is just:
sudo apt-get install offlineimap
If you know how for other OSs, please feel free to leave a comment.
Then, I made a configuration file that looks like this:
[general]
accounts = Gmail
maxsyncaccounts = 3
[Account Gmail]
localrepository = Local
remoterepository = Remote
[Repository Local]
type = Maildir
localfolders = /backup/USERNAME/mail
[Repository Remote]
type = IMAP
remotehost = imap.gmail.com
remoteuser = USERNAME@gmail.com
remotepass = PASSWORD
ssl = yes
maxconnections = 1
realdelete = no
Of course, you’ll need to replace “USERNAME”, “PASSWORD”, and probably change “/backup/USERNAME/mail” to where you want the backup to live.
I saved this configuration into /backup/USERNAME/USERNAME.imaprc.
Then, try running it with:
offlineimap -c USERNAME.imaprc -u Noninteractive.Basic
The -c argument points it at our config file rather than ~/.something
and -u changes the UI to a standard one rather than a heavy colourful
curses default (we’re going to use it as a cron job in a second so we
want a log-style).
If that works, it will probably take a while, but all your mail should get synced into that folder. You can confirm that everything worked by (e.g.)
mutt -f /backup/USERNAME/mail/INBOX
which will use “mutt” to view the data saved there (you might need to do
sudo apt-get install mutt for that too). If you look in the mail/
directory, you should see all your labels, as well as the standard Gmail
ones. And, though the files in the directories have ugly names, each one
corresponds to one mail message stored in text format, so in case of
emergency you could always go grubbing through the files to find
important information.
Now, if everything looks OK, you’ll probably want to schedule this to
run every so often. To accomplish this, I added this script into
/etc/cron.daily
#/bin/sh
offlineimap -c /backup/USERNAME/USERNAME.imaprc -u Noninteractive.Basic
Don’t forget to chmod +x that script.
And now I can sleep a little easier. I’d still be a Sad Panda if Gmail goes away, but I be much less irritated with a backup copy.
As you might glean from the name of the target directory (/backup)
this folder is also backed up via rsync. This is probably not necessary
(assuming both Gmail and your copy don’t disappear at the same time)
but it was just as easy for me.
Another possibility might be to sync Gmail directly into a large Dropbox folder. While it seems a little silly, it would then be almost impossible to lose all the copies of your mail that would be scattered around your various computers.