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A comment on Gmvault: Backup and restore your Gmail account. Parent comment

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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