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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so you weren't backing up your email account?

I don't know anyone that backs up their gmail account. I'm sure many people here do, but I am fairly certain 99% of users do not.

What recourse does someone expect when there is a problem with their free account? It's free! You have no SLA or data guarantees!

If you use a native email client and this client saves every mail on disk, you have a chance to have it backed up with everything else. It's still far to be the generic scenario, I think, but it should raise a bit the number of people having their gmail backed up.

I use IMAP clients on all my computers to access gmail so they inherently have a local backup. Then at the beginning of each month I go to Google Takeout - https://www.google.com/settings/takeout - to download all my Google stuff and add it to a backup that ends up in Dropbox. (I should also add that I run my own domain and email so gmail is just a backup account.)

However on checking takeout it turns out the one thing they don't provide is gmail! 8 of the 15 items backed up are related to Google+ though.

Wait, how many people back up their gmail account?

raises hand

http://gmvault.org/

How does anyone get upset when something they're not paying for stops working?

You definitely pay for gmail. Paraphrasing Heinlein, you pay for it other than with money.

I'm okay with that. It hasn't cost me anything I valued.

I swear people will find a way to feel entitled to just about anything.

As a google apps admin for my work I backup the entire domain's emails - there are a bunch of companies offering this as a service these days.

As a personal google mail user I use offlineimap to synchronise with a local maildir for both redundancy and reading my emails.

Mine is backed up to several copies of Apple Mail

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