How to back up your Gmail: The ultimate guide

A few years ago, I moved off of Office 365 and Outlook and onto Gmail. Many of you thought I'd regret the move, but I have to tell you that Gmail has been a nearly frictionless experience. I don't think I'd ever go back to using a standalone email application. In fact, I'm moving as many applications as I can to the cloud, just because of the seamless benefits that it provides.

Many of you asked the one question that did have me a bit bothered: How to do backups of a Gmail account? While Google has a strong track record of managing data, the fact remains that accounts could be hacked, and the possibility does exist that someone could get locked out of a Gmail account.

Many of us have years of mission-critical business and personal history in our Gmail archives, and it's a good idea to have a plan for making regular backups. In this article (and its accompanying gallery), I will discuss a number of excellent approaches for backing up your Gmail data.

By the way, I'm distinguishing Gmail from Workspace (formerly known as G Suite), because there are a wide range of Workspace solutions. Even though Gmail is the consumer offering, so many of us use Gmail as our hub for all things, that it makes sense to discuss Gmail on its own merits.

Overall, there are three main approaches: On-the-fly forwarding, download-and-archive, and periodic or one-time backup snapshots. I'll discuss each approach in turn.

On-the-fly forwarding

Perhaps the easiest method of backup, if less secure or complete than the others, is the on-the-fly forwarding approach. The idea here is that every message that comes into Gmail is then forwarded or processed in some way, ensuring its availability as an archive.

Before discussing the details about how this works, let's cover some of the disadvantages. First, unless you start doing this as soon as you begin your Gmail usage, you will not have a complete backup. You'll only have a backup of flow going forward.

Second, while incoming mail can be preserved in another storage mechanism, none of your outgoing email messages will be archived. Gmail doesn't have an "on send" filter.

Finally, there are many security issues involved with sending email messages to other sources, often in open and unencrypted text format.

Those considerations aside, it's a way to go.

Gmail forwarding filter 

The very easiest of these mechanisms is to set up a filter in Gmail. Set it to forward all your email to another email account on some other service. There you go. Done.

Workspace/g suite forwarding

One easy way I grab all incoming mail to my corporate domain is using a Google Workspace account . My company-related email comes into the Workspace account, a filter is applied, and that email is sent on its way to my main Gmail account.

This provides two benefits. First, I keep a copy in a second Google account and, for $5 per month,

I get pretty good support from Google. The disadvantage of this, speaking personally, is only one of my

many email addresses is archived using this method, and no mail I send is stored. 

Smtp server forwarding rules 

For the longest time, I used Exchange and Outlook as my email environment and Gmail as by incoming mail backup. My domain was set to an SMTP server running at my hosting company, and I had a server-side rule that sent every email message both to Exchange and to Gmail.

You can reverse this. You could also send mail for a private domain to an SMTP server, but use another service (whether Office 365 or something free, like Outlook.com) as a backup destination.

Forward to evernote

Each Evernote account comes with a special email address that you can use to mail things directly into your Evernote archive. This is a variation on the Gmail forwarding filter, in that you'd still use Gmail to forward everything, but this time to the Evernote-provided email address. Boom! Incoming mail stored in Evernote. 

Save emails from gmail to evernote

Evernote now has an Evernote for Gmail add-in that allows you to save emails from Gmail to Evernote. This add-on adds the familiar green elephant to your message interface. Tapping it drops the message right into Evernote.