> Everything is archived online and I don't need a local copy. Even with Gma...

Karunamon · on April 16, 2012

I think these concerns are vastly overstated, TBQH. The great majority of people seem to have no such issue with their accounts disappearing.

It's one of those exceedingly rare but potentially catastrophic things, kind of like a nuclear reactor meltdown or being struck by lightning.

fluidcruft · on April 17, 2012

If it was actually rare, wouldn't Google have nothing to lose by offering the safety blanket of real-live support (even if paid per-incident)?

Karunamon · on April 17, 2012

You can already get paid support.. by having an Apps account. This gets you access to an actual support line for emergency issues like, say, being unable to log in.

Not to mention a pretty reasonable SLA. At $50 a year, it's quite nice to have.

fluidcruft · on April 18, 2012

Too bad I can't do that for the @gmail account I've been using.

ep103 · on April 16, 2012

Do you know a good method of going about this? Thunderbird's backup utility (syncing to Gmail, downloading, then saving the thunderbird app data locally) is broken. Each backup / restore via TBird lost another ~350 emails.

toomuchtodo · on April 16, 2012

https://www.backupify.com/

I use it to backup both my personal Gmail account and my Google Apps work account, as well as my Flickr account. Its cost effective, and helps me sleep at night, considering my entire life is stored online.

icebraining · on April 17, 2012

If you're on UNIX/Linux, offlineimap[1] seems to work fine. I use it as my main email access, syncing IMAP to a Maildir which is then read by the client, and I've never lost an email.

[1]: http://offlineimap.org/