

Gmvault v1.7-beta, Gmail backup simply: The initial version I wanted to build - zoobert
http://geekomotion.posterous.com/3-months-later-gmvault-17-beta-the-first-rele

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terhechte
I decided I'm leaving Gmail at some point in the future, here's why: Yesterday
I wanted to comment on a video on Youtube. I clicked the 'reply' button, and a
message came up, telling me that I needed to create a YouTube channel (or
something) on order to be able to comment. So I quickly filled the mandatory
fields and hit save. The next thing I saw was a message from Google telling me
that my account had been locked because I am under 13 years of age. My Gmail
account! My account where I have all my precious data. Because I had a typo in
a field somewhere on YouTube! I understand that the US law requires these
things, but why on earth would a typo on YouTube kill my personal Email
account? Now I uploaded an image of my passport onto their servers to proof
that I'm over 13. If that doesn't work out, they'll delete _all my data_ in 29
days.

I can't explain how fed up I am about that. When I'm entering any date fields
on my Gmail account, I'm always cautious. But this was YouTube. Enough rant.

Thanks for this tool! When my account comes back up, I'll use it to keep the
data safe (I do have it in imap of course). And then at some point in the
future I'll look for an alternative to Google.

~~~
jonknee
That rant should also be directed at US law, which is pretty clear about what
Google needs to do in this situation. I suppose the problem is integrating
YouTube with Google accounts, but you could have just as easily muffed a field
in Gmail and had the same issue.

What should Google do when you state you are under 13? If they pop up a
message saying "Are you sure? All this cool stuff is going to go away if you
say that you are under 13." it breaks the intent of the law and child advocacy
groups would rightly eat Google for lunch.

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andybak
In case anyone misses it, the advantage of this over other IMAP solutions is
that it preserves information specific to Gmail - most importantly - labels
aren't converted into IMAP folders (and therefore emails aren't duplicated
needlessly).

~~~
zoobert
couldn't have said it better. In addition to emails, chats are also backed up
with v1.7-beta

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zoobert
This is a great opportunity to suggest new features/wishes for this tool.
Please let me know what you would like to have to v2.0

~~~
tom_usher
Thanks for your work on Gmvault - really helps with my peace of mind.

I'd love to see:

\- Better support for multiple accounts - at the moment I have to specify
separate data directories manually every time I want to re-run a backup of
each of my accounts. Would be great if Gmvault worked this out for me, and
could run a backup on multiple accounts in a single run.

\- Some way to read my backed up emails easily without re-importing them to
Gmail - a mini mail server, a web-based UI, etc.

\- A way to export to some other format if I want to migrate away to Gmail -
mbox, etc.

~~~
zoobert
thanks for the support. You can backup multiple accounts in one data directory
(Gmvault-db) with the option --multiple-db-owner. When you restore though all
the emails from this Gmvault-db will go to one Gmail account. If you want to
have the possibility to restore each account individually, then you have to
use a separate gmvault-db dir for each account. In the roadmap for v2.0 I have
some tasks to add a better support for managing multiple accounts. As you said
all the accounts will be incrementally backed up automatically onced
configured. v2.0 will provide a GUI and one feature should be to allow users
to browse their emails. A clean way to export emails in standard format
(MailDir and maybe mbox) is since this morning also in my roadmap.

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vasi
The #1 reason I want Gmail backup is to be able to migrate in case something
goes wrong with Gmail. Does Gmvault make this possible? I don't see any
documentation about exporting from Gmvault to another IMAP server, or to a
common format like Maildir or mbox so that I could run my own server.

~~~
mw6621
I use OfflineIMAP to back up Gmail and Google Apps mail. I have it set up to
run every evening from cron, backing up a Gmail account as well as a couple
Apps accounts. It uses Maildir format.

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

~~~
vasi
Yeah, I'm currently using OfflineIMAP until I find something better. But it's
really not a perfect solution: it downloads emails multiple times (once per
label), it doesn't restore to Gmail terribly well, it's pretty slow, and it
crashes sometimes. If Gmvault adds some sort of export facility, I'd switch.

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pasbesoin
As of circa 19:00 GMT, 2012-08-16, the Github repository is unavailable.

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zoobert
This was because of the planned Github downtime.

~~~
pasbesoin
Thanks! I'll try again later.

