After learning that my partner had his Google Account disabled due to a “glitch” in their system, and thus potentially lost everything -email, yes, but also contacts, Google docs, calendars, his Google voice number and more, all of which are tied variously to credit card accounts (email alerts/auto-pay notifications), personal and professional projects, (from newly written lyrics to notes and contact details for selling our home)- we realized with sinking stomachs that too much trust had been placed in the could.
Obviously I immediately felt compelled to backup everything locally. This event served as a stark reminder that while the cloud holds immense opportunities for computing power and storage, it should not be solely relied upon. Relying only on the cloud is akin to relying only on your one local hard drive, and in a word: Don’t. Backup, backup, backup.
Here’s what I’ve done so far. For any back up to truly work though, incremental backups need to be routine maintenance, like changing the oil in your car. Feel free to speak up and let me know what I missed or if you have found an awesome method that works for you.
Logged into Google and (luckily) still had access to everything. I opened up the the list of Everything Google and opened a new tab for each item I had something invested in.
For me this was: Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Groups, Google Mail, Picasa, Reader, and Sites.
Blogger and Calendar are, in my opinion the easiest to backup.
For Blogger go to “settings” -> “basic” and there at the top is “export blog”. Select this option, then click “download blog” and you’re done. It automatically downloads as blog-[date], so if you only have one blog, you are done. If, like me, you have more than one, simply change “blog” to [blog’s name] and save. This will make it easier to identify which backup file belongs to which blog down the road (i.e. should you need it).
To get your Calendar(s) -yes it will download them all at once- look on the left column of the calendar page and select “settings” under My Calenders. In about the middle of the page is the link “export calendars”. Click here and wait a sec while it zips up all your data in a nice, neat backup file.
To back up all of my Google Docs I used the steps outlined here (note that you need to go to the top right corner in google docs and click on the cog icon to be able to select “older version” to use the instructions listed in the link).
I’ll note here that I decided that what was stored in Groups, Picasa, Reader, and Sites was not of any real value to me, so I have not concerned myself with backing that data up. For Groups, I simply took a screen shot of the page listing My Groups. With Picasa the simplest solution is just to have your pictures also stored locally in the first place. But, for details on backing up Picasa settings (which might make it easier in the event you need to create a new Google Account), this link seems to be the most helpful, but this one might also be helpful, depending on your situation. I really don’t used Reader or Sites that much, but a quick search yielded the following tips for backing up Reader and Sites.
Now for the biggie: GMail itself. First don’t forget to also backup your contacts. But to actually back up your (possibly years) of email, you will need to download and install a mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, etc -supported clients are listed here) and then enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) and wait. Seriously. It’s going to take awhile. A quick how-to is described here.
Good luck out there.
