HACKER Q&A
📣 amacneil

Best way to back up cloud accounts?


I have 15+ years and 500+GB of personal data in my Google account. I'm personally happy with Google's services, security, and privacy, and am not looking to switch away. However, I would like to protect myself against losing access to my account (random unilateral Google termination, ransom, etc).

What services do people use to back up their cloud accounts, such as Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, etc?

Searching for "cloud backup" is useless, because it only returns results for backing up local data _to_ the cloud, not _from_ the cloud.

I am aware of Google Takeout, but it is a horribly manual process to wait for them to export half a TB of data and then upload it someplace else. I need something much more "set and forget".

For Gmail I have considered syncing everything to ProtonMail (or similar) via POP/IMAP. Curious if anyone uses this approach? Although unfortunately it would only cover Gmail and not Photos/Drive/etc.

  👤 jamessb Accepted Answer ✓
For copying data to/from cloud providers there is rclone [1]. This can copy from Google Drive, but for Google Photos it supports downloading files only at reduced (rather than original) resolution [2].

For backing up email, there is mbsync [3].

[1]: https://rclone.org/

[2]: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#downloading-images

[3]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/mbsync

👤 WheelsAtLarge
I just heard of a way to back up your Gmail. I have not tried it but by forwarding your email to yahoo from your Gmail you can keep your emails in two places. I don't know how this will work for your old email but going forward it keeps you from being dependent on just Gmail.

I don't know how to guard from having you Gmail account suddenly closed by Google. Many places require an active email to change it from one to another. What happens when your active account suddenly gets closed?

👤 chucky123
This is IMHO a really good question. The real question is - how can you easily migrate your data to another service.

OP, there are some tools that we use to backup gmail accounts. Look up tools like movebot.io, bittitan, etc.

These services also help you move data from Google's cloud.

Also in my experience, its easier to move stuff from your Google workspace account, and its actually harder to move from your private gmail account.

👤 stop50
For imap there is fetchmail. It will be a bit hard, because gmail wants the users to use oauth.