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Thanks to our homie Chris Brogan for this great advice and heads up.

Handsome Om Malik has officially scared the bejeesus
out of me with his post about Gmail suffering some kind of problem
resulting in deleted accounts, missing archives, etc. Story link is here.

Back Up Your Gmail

I took Om’s advice and backed my gmail account up. Here’s the steps I took.

1. Read Google’s Help document on POP access to your Gmail account.
2. Configure an account on your mail client for your gmail
   account. - IMPORTANT- Build a separate account. If you’re using
   Outlook, make sure this is a standalone PST file. If you’re using
   mail.app or Thunderbird, make sure this is a standalone account.
3. Do the sync between gmail and your client. NOTE: This will probably take a while.
   If you’ve got a fairly healthy gmail account with lots of archived
   mail, you will be at this step for hours. So, disable your computer’s
   sleep setting, but enable the screensaver if you want, and let it do
   its thing.
4. When it’s all there, turn off your mail client.
5. Locate your mail client’s file for the gmail mails.
6. Consider moving these (or making a copy) offline to a backup
   drive. In my case, I’m going to clip off a current update from today,
   and toss that entire file to my backup drive. Then, I’ll delete the
   account on my POP mail client, and go about my business.
7. Schedule your updates periodically with Google Calendar (provided THAT doesn’t encounter a whoops).

I am a *huge* supporter of web-side applications. I use Google mail,
calendar, docs, maps, and search every day. But an experience like what
Om points out at GigaOm is a great reminder that it’s still my job to
make appropriate backups of my records and not trust Google (or any
other company) to keep my data safe for me.

If you’re a gmail user, consider doing this within the next 24 hours
(provided you haven’t been doing this all along). External hard drives
are cheap (I just got a 200GB external drive for $99). Give your online
data a life vest.

technorati tags:chrisbrogan, gmail, google, bestdamntech, advice, backup

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