Gmvault v1.7-beta, Gmail backup simply: The initial version I wanted to build

Gmvault v1.7-beta, Gmail backup simply: The initial version I wanted to build(geekomotion.posterous.com)

35 points by zoobert 13 years ago | 23 comments

terhechte 13 years ago |

I decided I'm leaving Gmail at some point in the future, here's why: Yesterday I wanted to comment on a video on Youtube. I clicked the 'reply' button, and a message came up, telling me that I needed to create a YouTube channel (or something) on order to be able to comment. So I quickly filled the mandatory fields and hit save. The next thing I saw was a message from Google telling me that my account had been locked because I am under 13 years of age. My Gmail account! My account where I have all my precious data. Because I had a typo in a field somewhere on YouTube! I understand that the US law requires these things, but why on earth would a typo on YouTube kill my personal Email account? Now I uploaded an image of my passport onto their servers to proof that I'm over 13. If that doesn't work out, they'll delete all my data in 29 days.

I can't explain how fed up I am about that. When I'm entering any date fields on my Gmail account, I'm always cautious. But this was YouTube. Enough rant.

Thanks for this tool! When my account comes back up, I'll use it to keep the data safe (I do have it in imap of course). And then at some point in the future I'll look for an alternative to Google.

jonknee 13 years ago | |

That rant should also be directed at US law, which is pretty clear about what Google needs to do in this situation. I suppose the problem is integrating YouTube with Google accounts, but you could have just as easily muffed a field in Gmail and had the same issue.

What should Google do when you state you are under 13? If they pop up a message saying "Are you sure? All this cool stuff is going to go away if you say that you are under 13." it breaks the intent of the law and child advocacy groups would rightly eat Google for lunch.

andybak 13 years ago |

In case anyone misses it, the advantage of this over other IMAP solutions is that it preserves information specific to Gmail - most importantly - labels aren't converted into IMAP folders (and therefore emails aren't duplicated needlessly).

zoobert 13 years ago | |

couldn't have said it better. In addition to emails, chats are also backed up with v1.7-beta

zoobert 13 years ago |

This is a great opportunity to suggest new features/wishes for this tool. Please let me know what you would like to have to v2.0

tom_usher 13 years ago | |

Thanks for your work on Gmvault - really helps with my peace of mind.

I'd love to see:

- Better support for multiple accounts - at the moment I have to specify separate data directories manually every time I want to re-run a backup of each of my accounts. Would be great if Gmvault worked this out for me, and could run a backup on multiple accounts in a single run.

- Some way to read my backed up emails easily without re-importing them to Gmail - a mini mail server, a web-based UI, etc.

- A way to export to some other format if I want to migrate away to Gmail - mbox, etc.

zoobert 13 years ago | | |

thanks for the support. You can backup multiple accounts in one data directory (Gmvault-db) with the option --multiple-db-owner. When you restore though all the emails from this Gmvault-db will go to one Gmail account. If you want to have the possibility to restore each account individually, then you have to use a separate gmvault-db dir for each account. In the roadmap for v2.0 I have some tasks to add a better support for managing multiple accounts. As you said all the accounts will be incrementally backed up automatically onced configured. v2.0 will provide a GUI and one feature should be to allow users to browse their emails. A clean way to export emails in standard format (MailDir and maybe mbox) is since this morning also in my roadmap.

dan00 13 years ago | | |

"- Some way to read my backed up emails easily without re-importing them to Gmail - a mini mail server, a web-based UI, etc."

I'm using offlineimap, which syncs an IMAP server with the MailDir-Format. The MailDir-Format should be readable by any email program.

robmay 13 years ago | | |

If you want mbox you can try www.snapshottool.com, which runs in the cloud and provides a local download.

tropin 13 years ago | |

It would be useful to be able to pack the thousands of files in just one big 7z archive.

zoobert 13 years ago | | |

You can already do that by 7zipping the subdir db of the Gmvault-db dir. I think that 7zip can archive a directory tree. You could also tar it and 7zip it to have one dir containing everything.

vasi 13 years ago |

The #1 reason I want Gmail backup is to be able to migrate in case something goes wrong with Gmail. Does Gmvault make this possible? I don't see any documentation about exporting from Gmvault to another IMAP server, or to a common format like Maildir or mbox so that I could run my own server.

pasbesoin 13 years ago |

As of circa 19:00 GMT, 2012-08-16, the Github repository is unavailable.

zoobert 13 years ago | |

This was because of the planned Github downtime.

pasbesoin 13 years ago | | |

Thanks! I'll try again later.