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What's the best open-source GMail backup software that exists? Someone has setup something like that? (also archiving attachments, etc)

by oulipo 1y ago

sbarre 1y ago
This isn't exactly what you're asking for, but Google offers a service called Takeout that lets you request and download backups of all your data from their services, including Gmail. I have a reminder to trigger this every few months and update my local backup. If I recall it comes as a gzipped mbox file.
- oulipo 1y ago
  yes but I'd rather do it "continuously", the issue I want to back against is that Google locks me out of my account for some random reason
Leftium 1y ago
https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back - Open source - Resume (so backups/restores will eventually complete) Honorable mention: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ - Not open source - GUI with index: nice for searching mail locally - Resume only for backup (so large restores generally fail)
- crazygringo 1y ago
  I've been using: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault For a long time and it's worked great. But it seems like GYB is actively maintained, so maybe I should switch.
  - karteum 1y ago
    FWIW, I used gmvault a long time ago (N.B. I typically deactivated individual .eml.gz compression in favor of a more global compression with a squashfs archive of the gmvault backup). Since I found not very practical to search through that archive, I developed https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb in order to convert it to a local sqlite DB (I made it for personal use and chose to keep the schema simple to have simple queries for my case. If the DB was to grow bigger I'd probably use a different schema e.g. to place the contacts/from/to/cc in separate tables... I also chose to extract attachments directly on the filesystem rather than put them in the DB - which enable direct access and deduplication) (N.B. it can also process the mbox produced by https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ with the caveat that in some case Takeout permanently losses some information because of a bug with older encodings so I'd always prefer a backup using gmvault or imap)
- oulipo 1y ago
  Thanks!
nijave 1y ago
You can also use an IMAP client and set it to offline/download mode so it downloads everything and saves it locally. I think "offline mode" is what it's called in Evolution--not sure what Thunderbird or other clients call it.

What's the best open-source GMail backup software that exists? Someone has setup something like that? (also archiving attachments, etc)

by oulipo 1y ago

What's the best open-source GMail backup software that exists? Someone has setup something like that? (also archiving attachments, etc)

sbarre 1y ago

This isn't exactly what you're asking for, but Google offers a service called Takeout that lets you request and download backups of all your data from their services, including Gmail. I have a reminder to trigger this every few months and update my local backup. If I recall it comes as a gzipped mbox file.

oulipo 1y ago
yes but I'd rather do it "continuously", the issue I want to back against is that Google locks me out of my account for some random reason

Leftium 1y ago

https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back - Open source - Resume (so backups/restores will eventually complete) Honorable mention: https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ - Not open source - GUI with index: nice for searching mail locally - Resume only for backup (so large restores generally fail)

crazygringo 1y ago
I've been using: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault For a long time and it's worked great. But it seems like GYB is actively maintained, so maybe I should switch.
- karteum 1y ago
  FWIW, I used gmvault a long time ago (N.B. I typically deactivated individual .eml.gz compression in favor of a more global compression with a squashfs archive of the gmvault backup). Since I found not very practical to search through that archive, I developed https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb in order to convert it to a local sqlite DB (I made it for personal use and chose to keep the schema simple to have simple queries for my case. If the DB was to grow bigger I'd probably use a different schema e.g. to place the contacts/from/to/cc in separate tables... I also chose to extract attachments directly on the filesystem rather than put them in the DB - which enable direct access and deduplication) (N.B. it can also process the mbox produced by https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ with the caveat that in some case Takeout permanently losses some information because of a bug with older encodings so I'd always prefer a backup using gmvault or imap)
oulipo 1y ago
Thanks!

nijave 1y ago

You can also use an IMAP client and set it to offline/download mode so it downloads everything and saves it locally. I think "offline mode" is what it's called in Evolution--not sure what Thunderbird or other clients call it.