Over the course of this year, Gmail had more than a few outages – some lasting just a few minutes, others for hours. Since I conduct a lot of my business thru email, the prospect of a long Gmail downtime is a scary one. Then, there’s also the possibility of your account being blocked for no apparent reason, as what happened to a few people. And god forbid that it occurs again, I once had all my eXcite emails totally erased and irrecoverable because the server crashed during 9/11. Only 2% of their whole email archive was hit, unfortunately this included mine.

So lesson learned: backup, backup, backup. But how to do it?

Well, the traditional way is to backup via email clients: Outlook, Thunderbird, or others that you may be partial to. This is a fairly safe, tried and tested method which would suit most users.

Another way is to use services like MessageBunker that back-ups all your mail to the cloud. It’s currently still in beta and I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks promising. Their servers are housed in an ex-nuclear bunker, which might help your peace of mind.

Lastly, there’s Gmail Backup, a free application that was specially developed for this purpose. It’s interface is pretty simple. You only need to enter your email address, password, the backup directory in your computer, and the inclusive dates of the messages you want to fetch.

If you haven’t yet, you’ll need to enable IMAP access on your Gmail account. Don’t worry because your emails will not be deleted on the server. They will be saved in your computer as standard EML files, which you can then open in any email client, including their attachments. Fields like dates, labels and “From” are also preserved. Gmail Backup will fetch everything in your “All Mails” folder, including the contents of the Inbox, Sent, Received, and Drafts folders. If you’re planning to transfer your files to another Gmail account, you can also use this program to do it for you.

Those interested in giving it a try can download Gmail Backup here.