I run my Gmail account through eM Client and I love the ability to create scheduled backups. I have never lost anything but - before I do - I wanted to check a couple of things please.
The backup size seems small compared to all the Gmail I have in the cloud. Spinbackup allocates 5GB to gmail whereas my eM Client backups are just 16MB. Even though I can access of of my Gmails through eM Client maybe it doesn’t download them all to local - is there a way I can do this?
Is the backup designed to restore the same folder layout that I currently enjoy in eM Client/Gmail? Spinbackup, for example, restores to a single folder.
If you go to Menu > Tools > Accounts and click on the IMAP tab for your Gmail account, it most likely does not have the offline options selected. That means that eM Client only caches the message header, which is basically just the from to and subject lines, and that is why the backup is so small. This backup does not contain any of the message body or attachments. It is useless if you lose messages from the server. If you select the offline option, including attachments, eM Client will begin downloading the complete 5GB from the server. Give it some time and then do a backup. That backup should be about the same size as your server use.
The backup takes a snapshot of your current eM Client. The restore will reset eM Client to how it was at that time, and this will delete any newer information, settings etc. It is not possible to backup or restore a single folder using eM Client’s backup option.
Cheers Gary - I did see the IMAP settings after I posted, and changed them. Way better those alternative, expensive, backup options.
Also, happy with the second answer too. It is rare for a backup option to restore the full folder structures, so this is another big plus for eM Client!
Because eM Client is a SQL database, external backup options will not work anyway while eM Client is running. All you end up with is empty files, so those options like Carbonite are completely useless. You can use them though to backup the backup zip files which by default are in your Documents folder.
I agree. I’ve had a recent bad experience with Spinbackup (backing up straight from Gmail, at source) and it didn’t go as planned. That’s why I wanted to do some investigation into backing-up though eM Client locally and then onto my cloud backup of choice - Jottacloud.