Find out how to back up Gmail by downloading your data. Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and IMAP protocols.
At its launch in 2004, Gmail provided a storage capacity of one gigabyte per user, which was significantly higher than its competitors offered at the time. Today, the service comes with 15 gigabytes of storage. Users can receive Emails up to 50 megabytes in size, including attachments, while they can send emails up to 25 megabytes. In order to send larger files, users can insert files from Google Drive into the message. Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a “conversation view” similar to an Internet forum. The service is notable among website developers for its early adoption of Ajax.
Google’s mail servers automatically scan emails for multiple purposes, including to filter spam and malware, and to add context-sensitive advertisements next to emails. This advertising practice has been significantly criticized by privacy advocates due to concerns over unlimited data retention, ease of monitoring by third parties, users of other email providers not having agreed to the policy upon sending emails to Gmail addresses, and the potential for Google to change its policies to further decrease privacy by combining information with other Google data usage. The company has been the subject of lawsuits concerning the issues. Google has stated that email users must “necessarily expect” their emails to be subject to automated processing and claims that the service refrains from displaying ads next to potentially sensitive messages, such as those mentioning race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or financial statements. In June 2017, Google announced the end to the use of contextual Gmail content for advertising purposes, relying instead on data gathered from the use of its other services.
Here is How to back up Gmail
- Using a web browser, head to Google Takeout(opens in new tab), which is what Google calls its data downloading service. When prompted, sign in to your Google account if you aren’t already. Next, click Deselect all at the top of the page, as we only want to download our Gmail data at this point.
- Scroll down the page until you see Mail, then check the box by Mail. Now, click All Mail data included.
- To back up all of your Gmail folders, leave the box saying Include all messages in Mail checked. Otherwise, you can uncheck the box and select the individual folders you wish to back up. Once you’re done, click OK.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Next step.
- You’ll now see a bunch of options. If you want to just go ahead with your backup using the default settings, simply click Create export and you’ll receive an email with a link to download your Gmail data once it’s ready.Note that depending on the size of your Gmail data, it may take several hours or even days before your download is ready.Alternatively, if you’d rather fine-tune how your data is backed up, take a look at the next step to see what options you have.
- Note: You may skip this step if you already clicked Create export in the previous step.Under Delivery method, the default choice is Send download link via email. This will send a link to you once your data is ready to download, which you can then transfer to your computer or an external drive. Otherwise, you can choose to have your data upload to the cloud service of your choice by clicking the drop-down menu and selecting the cloud upload.Under Frequency, choose to either create a one-off download of all your data, or a file every 2 months for 1 year.Under File type & size, either choose to download/backup your data as a .zip or a .tgz file. You should keep this as .zip, unless you’re planning on importing your data to a computer running Linux.Finally, choose whether you want to split your data into smaller files, or keep it as one large file by selecting the most suitable file size. It’s generally fine to leave this setting at 2 GB, since a .zip file larger than this will simply be split into several .zip files which can still be opened together at the same time.Once you’re done making your selections, click Create export and you will either receive an email with a link to download your data or an email saying that the data has been uploaded to the cloud, depending on your chosen method.Note that depending on the size of your Gmail data, it may take several hours or even days before your download is ready.
