How To Back up Your Gmail Account

Many of us have important emails that we need to keep, or at least would like to keep. Many also have a business email account that holds many important files that are a necessity and you need to make certain you will never loose. That is where backup files come in.

Basically a backup file is having your information stored in more than one place, so if something happened to your first place say your computer, you will be able to get your lost files from your second place.

There are a few different ways to back up files. You can have your own external hard drive that allows you to backup chosen files at any time you deem necessary. You may even have the capability to set it up to automatically backup all of your files once a week.

Using The Basic Back-up Tool

A simple option to back up your Gmail account is to use another email account. This is an easy and cost effective way to backup any email account. First, you want to be certain that your chosen backup account is a POP/ IMAP, so Microsoft Outlook for example would work.

What you will want to do is sign into your Gmail account. In the upper right hand corner, you are going to see a gear, click on this and then click on mail settings. Your screen is going to show you your settings for your Gmail account as it currently stands.

If you are looking to make any changes to your account this is where you will do it. Near the top you are going to see different tab options, you will want to choose the forwarding and POP/ IMAP tab.

The first section is the forwarding section. Here you will click on the “add a forwarding address” button. After you click the button a small box should appear asking for the forwarding address, here you will add the address that you want your email to be forwarded too.

This is not necessarily backing up your files, it is making your email available in another account while still creating a file in your Gmail account. After entering your email address it will send a conformation email to that address to assure that this is the email address you want your email forwarded to.

With having a second email account of some kind that will also have copies of your emailed files, you are less likely to lose everything if something by chance were to happen to your Gmail account. It may not seem like it is actually backing up a file, but you are making a copy of it on a backup system.

Using Hotmail As Your Back-up Platform

There are not many fans of Hotmail out there – and that is not much of a surprise, however, we cannot deny one interesting point – it can be an incredible tool when you want to back-up your Gmail account.

What makes it so suitable for this job is how easy the entire process is – meaning that all you have to do is sign up for your Hotmail account and then simply look for TrueSwitch (which will help you transfer all your emails from Gmail to Hotmail). The wizard is easy to use and you can constantly sync it using the Forwarding address setting in Gmail*

*for this, under your Gmail account, go to Mail Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP and select the Add a forwarding address area.

Paid Back-up Services

Okay, I agree, paid back-up services are not for everyone – if you do not feel your email is worth that much “saving” at least. However, most of us to have a bunch of emails without which we would be quite lost. Now, how does it work?

Simple – once you sign up for an account they start pulling all your emails and saving a copy of each and every email you have on Google servers on their personal servers, making your correspondence thoroughly backed-up. The good news is that most such paid services offer a free trial, making it easier for you to evaluate whether you will need their services or not.