Today we will talk about some of the methods/tools which can help you backup your Gmail account either to your own system offline or some online system. Some of you have heard about the recent outage of Gmail for a very small percentage of users due to a bug occurred during a recent Gmail internal upgrade. Even though, Google was able to recover all emails of the affected users, its good to have a backup copy of your emails offline too. Today we will talk about some of these tools which can let you backup your Gmail.

1. GMAIL BACKUP

This is a great free tool to backup your emails from gmail Inbox automatically. You need to install it and provide your credentials like user name and password to start backing up your gmail. If you want, you can even customise the dates for backup or you can opt to backup only new emails.

Keep in mind, you need to have IMAP access enabled in your Gmail account to make it work. The speed of backup will vary depending on your internet connection speed and number of emails to backup.

Download Gmail Backup

2. Backupify FREE (2 GB)

If your Gmail account is having total emails of size less than 2 GB, which most of you may have then you can use Backupify FREE account to backup your Gmail account.

Backupify provides daily automatic backups, archiving, and export of Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and many other services.

Backupify Free  account lets you create weekly backups till 2 GB. Use it to make the weekly backup of your Gmail account automatic.

3.POP3/IMAP

You can use a email client right from your desktop like Thunderbird, Windows mail, Outlook etc. to have a local copy of all your emails as and when they arrive. You can configure your email client very easily after enabling POP3/IMAP from your Gmail account settings. If you are not sure of how to configure your email client, then just click on the “configuration Instructions” link in your gmail account settings.

Remember to leave a copy of your emails on your Gmail server while configuring client settings as your Gmail server is less prone to crashes compared to your own system.

4. Use Hotmail or Yahoo or any other Email account

You can use any other email account like Yahoo, Hotmail etc. which supports importing your emails from another email account like Gmail using POP3 or IMAP. Most popular email providers do support POP3 or IMAP and you can use them to have a backup copy of all your emails automatically into other email account.

5. Forward a Copy of email to other email address

You can also set your Gmail account to forward a copy of each email to another email account of your automatically whenever a new email arrives. You can easily do that from inside gmail account settings. Keep in mind, this method wont forward your old emails.

Apart from these methods, there are few more ways to backup your Gmail accounts. If you know about any of those, tell me using comments and I would update this post.

upify provides daily automatic backups, archiving, and export of Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and many other services.