How to back up your Gmail account

You no doubt would have seen the debacle caused by Gmail earlier this week when over 150,000 members lost access to their accounts, or simply couldn’t see their emails anymore.

While their accounts have now been restored, the incident nevertheless serves as a good example of why savvy users should be backing up their Gmail accounts in case any outage takes down their crucial data.

There are a few ways to do this, but by far the easiest is using the Mozilla email client Thunderbird, available on their website.

Once you have that installed, you should set up your Gmail to copy over. You need to actually go to your Gmail web account, then go to “settings”, and then choose “Mail settings”. You should then go to Forwarding and Pop/IMAP – ensure POP is enabled, and then select the option to keep Gmail’s copy.

In Thunderbird, head to the mail configuration panel and then change the incoming server to “pop.gmail.com”, the protocol to “POP” and the port option to “995”.

Once you see everything working, it will take awhile to copy everything over. You can then locate all your messages in your computer under your Thunderbird profile, which can be found by typing “%APPDATA%ThunderbirdProfiles” into the Start menu on Windows.