Tuesday 12 April 2011

How To Backup and Restore Gmail Emails in Ubuntu

Hey Guys!

Welcome back Ubuntu adventurers! I have come across a really cool tool that enables you too backup and restore all of your Gmail emails locally just in case things go wrong or if you delete some mail. The tool that we will be using is called ‘Backup Gmail’ (inventive hey!).

Backup gmail can be used to make full backups of your emails from Gmail and also take incremental backups. For those of you that don’t know, an incremental backup is a backup of files (or in this case emails) that have changed since the last backup. It will even preserve the read/unread state of emails if you want it too. Pretty nifty hey!

Hold your horses Ubuntu adventurers….there’s more! Backup Gmail can also backup emails from between a certain time scale, for example, you could backup emails from between 01/01/2010 - 01/01/2011 or any date you like…clever or what?

I have tested Backup Gmail with both a free Gmail account and also my Google Apps account and both work well :)

Backup Gmail Window

How To Install

Firstly, you will need to install the dependencies, you do this by running the following command in a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install python-pyside.qtgui python-pyside.qtcore

To use ‘Backup Gmail’, download it from Launchpad (make sure you download the latest version), extract it and double click “gui.py”, then select “Run”. You can also set up automated backups using the command line interface - navigate to the folder where you’ve extracted Backup Gmail and run “./backup_gmail.py –help” to see all the available options. Basically all the features that are available for the GUI are also available in the command line interface.

Important: do not check the “Incremental Backup” option the first time you do a backup because you’ll get an error like this: “username or password incorrect”. You can check this option once you’ve performed the first backup.

Hope you like it guys :)

Jing

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