Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account

Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by handruin on Friday November 18, 2016 @11:54AM (#12988112)

I'm interested to know what the pros and cons are of this utility vs using the Google takeout functionality? I like the idea of this project but I don't know what it would gain me over Google's native export? Is it the restoration that's missing from Google's service?

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by xur17 on Friday November 18, 2016 @04:50PM (#12990372)

My coworker and I both tried this yesterday, and today we both received an email with this error message: "Sorry, we encountered a problem when creating your Google data archive."

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by agumonkey on Saturday November 19, 2016 @02:39AM (#12992491)

Took out my Google data a few times, now amounting 1.4GB never had this issue. Let's hope it's only a temporary slipup.

btw, the data is pretty exhaustive, even for non major Google applications or more recently added features (Maps Location History).

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by lkesteloot on Saturday November 19, 2016 @02:35AM (#12992482)

Me too. They must have had a surge of takeouts given the recent lock-outs.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by amelius on Friday November 18, 2016 @04:21PM (#12990186)

Probably the most useful aspects are that you can run it in batch mode (without supervision), and that you can backup incrementally.

(Note that these aspects may also make the tool a little more dangerous to use.)

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by e40 on Friday November 18, 2016 @02:22PM (#12989349)

I'd like to know, too. On the surface, it would seem that scripting is the main benefit to it, but there might well be other pros/cons.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by handruin on Friday November 18, 2016 @03:54PM (#12989992)

Very good point. This would make it easier for me to add to a service or cron job to pull periodically.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by tonyplee on Friday November 18, 2016 @12:07PM (#12988199)

I just started a takeout session on all my google drive, emails data too.

I wonder how to use them once I have the backup data?

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by JonathonW on Friday November 18, 2016 @12:27PM (#12988356)

Exactly what you get from Takeout varies from service to service; for email you get an MBOX-format mailbox file (that you can then import into a desktop email client of your choice).

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by dmd on Friday November 18, 2016 @01:27PM (#12988922)

Really? mbox, not maildir? That must be insanely huge.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by cdubzzz on Friday November 18, 2016 @01:37PM (#12989000)

I pulled mine recently and it was about 3.5GB with ~115k items (chat messages are included). Also pulled my wife's - 217k items @6GB.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by dmd on Friday November 18, 2016 @01:46PM (#12989073)

Right. So, maildir format then, not mbox.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by cdubzzz on Friday November 18, 2016 @01:58PM (#12989161)

It is actually mbox. I should have provided more detailed numbers - in my Takeout file, for example, there are 91,360 chat messages and only 23,407 email messages .

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by dmd on Friday November 18, 2016 @02:05PM (#12989218)

So there's 23407 email messages but only one file containing all of them?

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by cdubzzz on Friday November 18, 2016 @02:11PM (#12989264)

Yep! All messages are in a single mbox file and it's 3.2GB.

  cdubz@professor-farnsworth ~/data $ du -h Mail-chris.mbox 
  3.2G	Mail-chris.mbox

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by dmd on Friday November 18, 2016 @02:20PM (#12989341)

Wow. I stand corrected and that's awful. Yet another reason to use gmvault!

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by icebraining on Friday November 18, 2016 @04:04PM (#12990057)

Why it awful? As an archive, seems decent.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by dmd on Friday November 18, 2016 @04:14PM (#12990131)

(1) inconsistent escaping rules (dealing with the literal string \nFrom)

(2) easy to corrupt

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by creeble on Friday November 18, 2016 @05:33PM (#12990635)

Worth noting that Google provides some Python sample code for parsing the file which works great.

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Re:Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account by cdubzzz on Friday November 18, 2016 @05:55PM (#12990753)

Interesting - could you point out where to find this? I poked around a bit but didn't come up with anything.

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