Backup And Restore Your Entire Gmail Account with Gmvault

For most of us Gmail account is precious virtual goods which we can’t afford to lose. It is a nightmare to even think of losing emails, chat conversations and important attachments stored in our Gmail account. Though you can always setup multiple Gmail/other email accounts and use it as backup of important emails by setting auto forward filters.

The other way to create backup of your Gmail account is by setting up Outlook or similar email clients with IMAP/POP facility. If you are not comfortable with any of these backup methods then here nifty tool, Gmvault which you may like to use for creating backup of your entire Gmail account.

Gmvault is currently in beta mode, yet powerful tool with awesome features to not just backup your Gmail account emails but also offer the ability to restore, encrypt, sync your Gmail account. Gmvault is designed to support most popular platform such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and requires minimal efforts to setup backup and sync.

In order to get started you need to download Gmvault and Python 2.7.x or 2.6.x library. Update: As per software authors comment, you do not need Python library to be installed, on Windows and Mac Gmvault will work out of the box. On Linux you will need Python if you use the src distribution or install it from Pypi. Once you finish installing Gmvault, a shortcut to Gmvault will be placed on your desktop. Simply double click to launch Gmvault Shell.

Before you can begin setting up sync or backup, you have to authenticate and approve Gmvault access to your Gmail account. You can do this by entering the following command at Gmvault Shell.

If you are comfortable with providing password, then you can simply add –p flag and enter your password. However, it is advisable to use Gmail oAuth feature for security reason.

It is likely that many will be having Gmail account size in GBs , and you would wish to see how long it will take to complete backup of your Gmail Account. Thankfully Gmvault also displays the estimated time remaining to complete the backup. Since there is no GUI interface you would have to reply on different flags and commands offered by Gmvault to backup, restore, select a directory to save DB, sync etc.

Gmvault offers two options to restore your emails, partial or quick restore, will only restore last 2 months of emails and full restore will attempt to completely restore the local email repository into the given email address.

You can also apply the label to current restore you are performing. Here is in dept command lists supported by Gmvault.

Download Gmvault for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.