Backing up your email
20 April 2012
James Fallows had an article in the Atlantic last year that did a good job of scaring the wits out of me, as any entertaining and informative security article should. Fallows described what happened when his wife’s Gmail account was hacked and she (briefly, before friends of theirs at Google saved the day) lost the entire contents of her Gmail account. The experience got Fallows thinking about how vulnerable we are when we store our information in the cloud.
My passwords are strong — and I’m hoping yours are too after reading the articles on DtheK — but what if your account gets broken into anyway, either through a server problem, hacker, or some other issue? Most of us would be willing to expend considerable effort to prevent the loss of all of our email data in such a worst case scenario, so I’ve compiled a few ways you can protect yourself. Each method is rated by difficulty, using the “Grandma Frustration-O-Meter” gold standard.
Options for backing up your email accounts
- Use a desktop client like Microsoft Outlook, Zimbra, or Mozilla Firebird to download and store copies of your emails on your hard drive. Grandma-Frustration-O-Meter: What the dang is POP3? Aaack!
- If you want to backup a Gmail account, start a new Hotmail account. Then ask Hotmail to store copies of your emails. Or vice versa if you use Hotmail and want Gmail to store your emails. I haven’t looked into Yahoo, but I’m guessing something similar might work for that. Grandma-Frustration-O-Meter: Goes down easier than a warm glass of milk.
- Use Gmail Backup and hope that it is not stealing your password information like the program described here. User beware, but one reason to trust it is that it is featured on the Google Apps Marketplace; another reason is that Softpedia certifies it as a clean program, free of adware, spyware, and viruses. Grandma-Frustration-O-Meter: I have to remember to run the program monthly? Okey dokey. What? Where am I?
- Use Backupify, an online service that claims to be able to store all of your Gmail account information and settings, then restore it to a Gmail account at any time. Sounds great, but of course you have to trust Backupify with your email content. Even if you trust Backupify to keep your information private, you now have to worry about two websites that could potentially get hacked instead of just one. Grandma-Frustration-O-Meter: Remember the warm glass of milk? It’s like that, but pricier.
- Pray. Don’t worry about backups, use the password “Lucky123” for every account on the internet, and pray that trouble won’t befall you. Grandma-Frustration-O-Meter: Ignorance is bliss… while it lasts
While I am uneasy about giving my email password to anyone but Google, I have chosen options 1 and 2 (note that options 3 and 4 require trusting another program, company, or website with your password, too). Make your choice, and may the odds be ever in your favor.