A couple of weeks ago there were some problems for a few thousand users of Gmail…they lost access, and it seems that their accounts were accidentally erased… Things were rectified within a day or so… But the idea of losing all of your emails, all of your contacts, and your Gtalk conversations had gotten a lot of people a bit worried…
Luckily there are some pretty easy remedies for this potential problem… The obvious one is to back up your Gmail account…There are a number of different tacks to take within this idea.
The simplest, sloppiest, and arguably least effective way would be to create a comparable email account with Hotmail (MSN.com, Hotmail.com, etc.). This Microsoft email service is quite similar to Gmail, and you could easily have all of your emails mirrored to this other online site. While this is easy, there are some niggling problems with this method to retain some control over your emails…The most obvious one is that whatever could happen to Gmail (and Google in general) could just as easily happen to Hotmail (and Microsoft in general). In modern parlance, this method could be called ‘kicking the can down the road’.
The next level, and one of the most effective would be to set up a Thunderbird email program on your PC…once set up (with your Gmail account) it will by design keep copies of all of your email locally on your hard drive. Here is a link to start you down this road: How to backup Gmail mail messages using Thunderbird
There are plenty of other ways for you to copy your account to a local drive (I think that using Thunderbird may be the simplest and most fool proof…). Here is a link to a tutorial on how to use a freeware program to save all of your Gmail account to a local drive: How to Backup Your Gmail Account to YOUR Hard Drive
If you are not quite as paranoid as all that and you don’t mind the possibility of paying for a service there is another alternative: Backupify
This is a cloud storage service for individuals and businesses which can store (on a weekly basis) all of your Twitter account, Gmail, Google Docs, and almost any other online source of your content.
Backupify – back up your social networks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To-H0CE0tSA
