Ask HN: What do you use to backup email?

6 points by snoopy_telex 3 years ago | 13 comments

Howdy HN,

I'm realizing that I don't have a good story for backing up my email. I rely on my provider, and with the recent rackspace outages, I want to start backing up my emails locally.

How do you folks handle backing up your email?

eimrine 3 years ago |

I use prays. Kneeing around my laptop and asking all gods together to make Google not to freeze my account.

mikewarot 3 years ago |

When I was a Windows SysAdmin, everything was Exchange/Outlook, the worlds most magical database (disguised as an email system). Syncing things worked, you could send/update stuff online and it just worked. Thus, everything was available offline in your .OST files on the client, even if the server vaporized.

Now that I'm out of professional IT, I've got thousands of unread emails in Gmail, and a few hundred in my last name email that I never worry about. I check email once a day, if ever.

I'd use IMAP and back up the local copy if I ever get back into needing reliable storage for my email again.

runjake 3 years ago |

I don't. Email is mostly ephemeral for me.

If it's something crucial I save it and any attachments to the appropriate folder on my local filesystem, which gets 3-2-1 backed up.

yellowapple 3 years ago |

I self-host my mail, with OpenSMTPd and Dovecot delivering to / reading from my system user's Maildir (full documentation: https://mail.yellowapple.us). This means that backing up / restoring my emails is just a matter of backing up / restoring ~/Maildir (and I've indeed gone through that exercise before).

madhusree1209 3 years ago |

Back up your email Select File > Open & Export > Import/Export. Select Export to a file, and then select Next. Select Outlook Data File (.pst), and select Next. Select the mail folder you want to back up and select Next. Choose a location and name for your backup file, and then select Finish.

howlett 3 years ago |

I'm using getmail (https://pyropus.ca./software/getmail/) as a cronjob every night to download it all and then sync with an offsite backup

p0d 3 years ago |

Fastmail (with my own domain names) is my mail provider and Gmail is my mail client. Therefore my mail is in two locations.

Local backups do not concern me. I am more concerned with the risk of my domain names being tied to a free entity like Gmail.

helph67 3 years ago |

Using rsync (Linux) to copy Thunderbird files to external USB drive regularly.

sarcasmatwork 3 years ago |

That really depends on the mail server/client.

For Outlook, you can easily backup the pst file.

Mailinabox, you can backup the entire folder structure.

Gmail still lets you download an archive.

There is always an option to print to pdf, and save each pdf offline.

josefresco 3 years ago |

I use Google Workspace and open Mozilla Thunderbird (Portable) quarterly to pull down copies (via IMAP) of my email. Has worked well for the last 3-4 years.

codegeek 3 years ago |

IMAP to download locally and then rsync them to an offsite server.

hamdouni 3 years ago |

Imap to retrieve them locally

dontbenebby 3 years ago |

Why would I do that? ;-)