Hello everyone,
I’m planning to make sure my Gmail data is backed up properly before proceeding.
I know Google Takeout allows exporting emails, but it doesn’t offer filtering or structured migration options.
Has anyone used a professional tool for selective Gmail backup (like date-based export or format conversion)? I came across SysInfo Gmail Backup Tool, which seems to provide filtering and multiple export formats.
Would appreciate suggestions or real experiences.
I leave my mail on Googles servers, and let them worry about maintaining backups, as nothing in there is important enough to me to bother taking a copy myself. If it all goes, I
would lose nothing, including sleep.
However, a quick and relatively easy way to do this would be to run Thunderbird (or any mail program that pulls a copy down from Gmail, which would probably be “all of them”) and then applying any filters you wish, followed by backing up it’s mailbox files using restic or your backup program of choice onto a backup device.
Under the covers, I suspect most of the programs, such as your Sysinfo suggestion, are doing precisely this, likely via pop.
Google likely has a more robust backup system than anything I could come up with, so frankly I leave it up to them. If I lost emails from my GMail, that would honestly be the least of anyone’s concerns, as it would be a huge systemic breakdown in a lot of core Google services to get to that point.
I’ve used evolution or thunderbird and copied mail to local folders and then backed those up. It was a bit tedious at times but not difficult.
I use Thunderbird or Betterbird and leave the email on the Gmail server. Works for me. But then I don’t have any real important stuff there.
I worked at research institute (before Starlink) where many users spent time in the field with no internet access. Gmail supports an “offline” configuration but it may require Crome:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1306849?hl=en-to.