Your state of the art RAID device is no good if you don't use it
properly to back up your data. Even if you fire up your backup software
routinely and make a copy of everything from the boot loader up to your
music, you're leaving a huge gap in your backup policy.
You might
not realise what you're missing yet, but the 150,000 people who
temporarily lost the contents of their Gmail inboxes earlier this year
will know exactly what we're taking about.
There's something about big-name web apps that make us trust their
remote servers, which are just as fallible as our own kit and are
located halfway across the world. Whether it's Gmail, Flickr, Facebook,
Twitter, your website or your blog, we've all got data out there.
If
you don't want to wake up to an empty account or the realisation that a
service you've come to rely on has been discontinued, it's time to get
your act (and your data) together.
Back up Gmail
Gmail
is the most popular free, web-based email service. It offers over 7GB
of storage capacity, and people used it as an online storage repository
to store their files long before purpose-built storage on the cloud
became affordable.
The best way to create a local backup of your
emails is to use an offline IMAP client like Mozilla Thunderbird. IMAP
(internet message application protocol) is the most popular protocol for
retrieving emails. Most popular email clients support the IMAP
protocol, but the advantage of Thunderbird (besides being free) is that
it offers a consistent environment across Linux, Windows and Mac OS X,
so you should be able to reproduce these steps no matter which OS you
use.
Log into your Gmail account to enable IMAP access. Click the
'Options' icon, followed by 'Mail settings', then head to the
'Forwarding and POP/IMAP' tab. Make sure POP is disabled and IMAP access
is enabled.
Head to Thunderbird's website,
where you can grab and install the latest version for your platform.
When you launch it for the first time, Thunderbird will prompt you for
your account information. Give it your name, your Gmail username
(including '@gmail. com') and password. When you click 'Continue',
Thunderbird will fetch settings to let you send and receive email via
Gmail. Accept the settings by clicking the 'Create account' button.
If
you already use Thunderbird to manage another account, you can add your
Gmail to your setup. Launch the client, head over to 'Tools | Account
Settings' and select 'Add mail account' from the dropdown list on the
left.
Once set up, Thunderbird will authenticate your Gmail
account and grab all your emails – received and sent. Depending on the
size of your account (scroll down to the bottom of your Gmail account to
find out how large it is), fetching all the emails might take some
time, from a couple of hours to a couple of days.
You can fire up
Thunderbird on a regular schedule and let it grab your new messages. To
make sure the messages are available while you're offline, head to
'File | Offline | Download/sync now'. You can use Thunderbird as your
regular email client, and switch between it and the web interface.
Once
set up, Thunderbird will recreate all your labels on Gmail as folders,
and messages with multiple labels will be displayed in both folders.
Folders created in Thunderbird will be created as labels in the online
version of Gmail.
In Thunderbird, use either 'Move to' or 'Copy
to' to apply or change labels to messages. When you write and send a
message from Thunderbird, it will show up in the 'Sent mail' folder in
the web interface.
Restore deleted emails
For
most situations, Thunderbird is an ideal backup strategy for Gmail. But
there's safety in numbers, which is where Gmail-Backup comes into play.
This program copies your emails, but unlike Thunderbird, it can also
restore them back to your Gmail account.
If you accidentally
delete a thread in Gmail, it will only exist in Thunderbird until you
sync it up with your account. When it syncs, Thunderbird will also
delete the copy of the thread from your hard disk. With Gmail-Backup,
you can restore messages from a backed up copy.
First, grab Gmail-Backup from www.gmail-backup.com. Although the program hasn't been updated for some time, it still works well.
There
isn't much setup involved. Fire it up and point it to your Gmail
account by specifying the login name (with '@gmail. com') and password.
You also need to point it to a folder where it can store the downloaded
emails.
Your emails are stored in the standard EML format and can
be viewed in any email client, including Thunderbird. As with
Thunderbird, how long the initial download takes will depend on the size
of your inbox.
With Gmail-Backup you also have the flexibility
of downloading messages between specific dates by entering the date
intervals. The program backs up the 'All mails' folder, which includes
all received, sent and draft emails. It also keeps a record of all the
labels (in a 'labels.txt' file), and lets you add labels manually before
restoring the emails to Gmail.
To restore emails, either to the
same email account or a different one, you need to specify its login
details. If you want to restore all emails, select the 'Newest emails
only' box; otherwise, specify a time period.
One inconvenience
with Gmail-Backup is that when it restores messages, sent emails don't
show up under 'Sent mail' in the web interface. You can see them in the
'All mail' view, though.
Back up address books
Almost all web mail services let you export your address book. In
Gmail, head to the 'Contacts' tab, and select the 'Export' option from
the 'More actions' dropdown list. You can now export your address book
in Outlook CSV or vCard format to import into Thunderbird, or in
Google's CSV format to import back into Gmail.
In Yahoo Mail, go
to 'Contacts', click 'Tools' and select 'Export' from the dropdown menu.
From the list, pick a format that's compatible with the into you want
to import the addresses into. The Yahoo CSV format works best to import
the contacts into Gmail.
You can also pull in contacts and emails
from other web mail from within Gmail. Go to your Mail Settings page in
Gmail, and click on the 'Accounts and import' tab. Now click the
'Import mail and contacts' button, and fill in details of the account
you want to import the address book from. Once Gmail connects, you can
select the type of data you want it to import.
Once all the addresses are in your Gmail address book, the Google-Contacts plugin can sync it with Thunderbird.
Store passwords
Juggling
passwords for web services isn't much of an issue thanks to OpenID, but
not all services use it. Then there are services you registered with
before they supported OpenID.
That's where LastPass steps in.
It's a password manager that works across browsers on all operating
systems, and on several mobile devices. It encrypts all your passwords
and keeps them on your machine. You can switch browsers or operating
systems, and still have access to them.
LastPass is easy to
download and install. It detects your system settings automatically and
points you to the appropriate file. Once installed, it'll sit next to
your browser's address bar. It's wise to back passwords up to your local
disk periodically.
Click the LastPass icon next to the address
bar, and head over to 'Tools | Export to'. From here you can download
the passwords as a plain text LastPass CSV file, or an encrypted file.
Resource: TechGIg site