How to create a free off-site email backup storage archive
By Adam Boettiger
[Updated with new information: 4 JULY 2008]
- How to migrate email from one Gmail account to another
- Using Google Apps Premier to boost the storage capacity of your email archive
Would it be useful to you to be able to access any email you ever sent or received? What if you could access this power from the palm of your hand via an iPhone or BlackBerry mobile device?
Quite a few folks have asked me how I have my email set up.
I can search an archive of over 75,000 email messages dating back a full two years, all from the palm of my hand via my iPhone while on the train commute into work, at the office, on vacation - anywhere.
Sound useful? You bet it is! It means I no longer need to be an Email Pack Rat, accumulating bits and bytes on my laptop’s hard drive, counting the days until my email database file becomes corrupted or crashes. I run a lean ship these days, despite an inbound flow of over 200 email messages per day.
To see if this is right for you, take the following test in your email program:
You corresponded by email with a woman back in June of this year three times about possibly using her virtual assistant services. You can’t locate her phone number and you don’t really remember her full name, only that her first name was “Kristin”. How long will it take you to find the email message from June that has both her cell phone # and email address, allowing you to touch base with her?
It took me less than 15 seconds on any web browser on any computer. That’s powerful.
I feel comfortable deleting anything and everything from my desktop email program, knowing that if I truly ever need it again, it is only but a few keystrokes away. Having an empty Inbox is like breathing fresh, mountain air for the first time after being stuck in smog for months.
In this article I’ll outline the how and why everyone should at least experiement with an off-site email archive, even if they seldom actually use it. My objective in this strategy is to show you how to:
- Create a backup of all of your email email (both sent and received, from one or multiple addresses) and to have that backup reside off-site, not specific to any particular machine, external drive or media
- Provide for a physical separation between “real” email communications (two-way) and publication subscriptions (inbound-only). It was desirable for me to do this because when I travel I find that I may not want to receive or have time to review the majority of email that comes in, particularly if it is a newsletter or discussion list traffic.
- To provide for the ability to control which email is sent to my mobile device (currently an iPhone as of this writing)
- To create a highly searchable index of email messages, that does not need to reside on my laptop and take up disk space, but that I can easily access via web browser from any computer, at any location, including a mobile device.
This strategy meets my needs and has done so for some years now. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).