Emails are an integral part of our lives- so much so that we often take it for granted. But what if a data loss occurs and you lose emails that you had previously saved? Or what if you lose access to your Gmail account and can’t get back in it? If your account is hacked, the hacker could easily delete every email that you’ve been saving for years. if you use Gmail for your business this means that you could lose important documents or attachments. Gmail does not save your emails to your hard drive, it is strictly a cloud service, which means that you get the convenience of access from anywhere but unlike other clouds services that allow you to retain a copy of the files on your hard drive, Gmail does not.
Recent cloud incidents
There have been a number of recent incidents involving data loss through a variety of cloud services. Some of the services involved include Amazon S3, Dropbox, Evernote and Google Drive. This is why you need to back up these services as well and I’ll tell you how at the end of this article. For now we will concentrate on Gmail.
How Gmail email loss can occur
Just because Google saves your emails on multiple machines doesn’t mean that this is a bulletproof backup solution. Google’s backup is great for fires, floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters, but it doesn’t offer a great solution for user error. As noted above, a hacker could delete your emails, YOU could accidentally delete your emails or someone you authorize to access your account could accidentally delete your emails. Even worse, there have been cases where Google has accidentally deleted Gmail accounts.
Google disables accounts if they even suspect them of a ToS violation
Another problem with Google is that if they suspect you of breaking their ToS, your account will be deleted. You are guilty until proven innocent in these cases and without any official Google support, it can be a tough and time-consuming task to get your account back IF you are even able to. It can be a nightmare for users that get their accounts disabled, which is why you need to back up Gmail using another solution.
An incident of human error, Google error or malicious deletion could potentially cost you a lot of time, money and more. So now you see WHY you need to back up Gmail. Wouldn’t it also be great if you could access your Gmail attachments without the need to go online, search emails, open the email and download the attachments?
Other backup methods are not efficient
You may already be using other methods to back up your Gmail account such as using a client email program like Outlook or Thunderbird to download your email to your hard drive. There are a few problems with that approach:
- Emails are downloaded in the proprietary format of the specific email client.
- Your PC must be running all the time to control whether it’s working – this is not okay if you’re mobile: It can also be a problem if you don’t have just one computer.
- Attachments are not extracted – so you will still have to search through emails to access attachments.
The ultimate Gmail backup solution: cloudHQ
The ultimate back up solution is one that is already well-known for its cloud backup services: cloudHQ. CloudHQ provides a back up solution for Gmail users that allows users to back up their Gmail emails to other cloud services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, etc. Everything is done automatically and runs in the background- it is completely transparent to you.
CloudHQ offers users the choice to save their emails in HTML, TXT or EML formats. Attachments will be backed up to the cloud storage account of your choice and most cloud services save a copy of the files on your hard drive. So now you have the ultimate Gmail backup solution. You have taken the control away from Google. If they disable your account, you will still have access to ALL emails and attachments that you have saved. If emails are accidentally or maliciously deleted, you still have a complete backup on the cloud service and on your hard drive. Want to know how to do it? Just watch this short video with the easy instructions on how to back up your Gmail account using cloudHQ.