Agreed. Just pointing out the fact that IMAP alone isn't enough. Nothing replaces backups (whether from your IMAP client or from Google's own backup service.)
Yeah, Gmail's probably got good backups, and I love it, but I'm not fond of putting all my eggs in one basket. Plus, Gmail's down occasionally, and it's a real hassle not being able to even view/search old emails when that happens, or when you don't have a net connection.
I use getmail to backup my Gmail (per that link), but there is still data loss. You can either use POP and lose your labels or use IMAP and lose your unread status (IMAP mode marks everything as read - someone patched getmail to offer a "leave unread" option but the maintainer refuses to accept any such patches).
Also, Google throttles your downloads - on POP this takes the form of returning just a few emails per download. It took me about three months to have a full backup at home, and I'm a paying customer (~30gb of mail on Apps Premier or whatever they're calling it today).
That's what we're doing now. We have backups of all our servers, and user backups for all the laptops..
But Google Apps is a pain in the butt to backup, since we don't have direct file access to things. The best strategy I can see, if you want to stick with it, is to email yourself every file, every edit. That's pretty insanely tedious.
Agreed. Another compelling reason is data deletion -- accidental or malicious. While catastrophic loss due to hardware seems to have declined over the past few years, malicious deletion has gone up markedly.
I've pimped them out before, but this is why I set up backupify (handle more than just gmail, since your Google password is for all your Google accounts) and periodically export my data. I just wish they did more, like backup my Dropbox and Atlassian accounts.
A decent hoster or mail service provider takes care of that for you. They have at least 2 different backups, one on site and one off site. You don't take care of that yourself and the backup is entirely transparent to you. This is why service providers can make money: because they can take care of things for you. It is their raison d'être. Taking care of that yourself is as ridiculous as hosting the email servers yourself. It's not cost effective anymore. The only conclusion from this story is that Google is not a decent hoster or email service provider. The company using them can be excused for expecting better service and they are rightfully moving their business elsewhere.
If you use a native email client and this client saves every mail on disk, you have a chance to have it backed up with everything else. It's still far to be the generic scenario, I think, but it should raise a bit the number of people having their gmail backed up.
Mixed reviews on the Google Apps marketplace for backupify: https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewReviews?pr... -- 27 users take 21 days to backup? Might well be the Google Apps infrastructure that's not up to the task. Looking at my company's Google apps domain, we probably have several million threads and are close to a terabyte of data. I imagine backing that up via IMAP could take a while.
There's a business opportunity out there for someone to build a "Google Backup" tool. It would synch your G-drive to Dropbox, your Gmail to yahoo mail, and so on. Marketed as "in case they turn evil" and intended people like you (and me!) who have this concern.
The company would become useless if Google ever fixed their customer service problems ("they closed my account and wouldn't say why!"), but Google has demonstrated they WON'T fix that.
> ...because an email server is backed by a database and doing database backups right is hard if that is not your day-job.
I store my email on dovecot with Maildir storage. For a single or just a few accounts is perfectly fine and you can backup the emails with your favorite backup tool.
I use google apps for email, and it's almost impossible to backup all the mails..
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