410-696-4690
Automate Your Gmail Backups
Yesterday Gmail was down for a short period of time though to some it was an eternity. We recommend Google Apps (with Gmail) to a lot of clients due to the incredible reliability, unbeatable price (free for most purposes) and normally near 100% up-time. Due to the mayhem that ensued across the blogosphere we decided to run some internal backups so we have a fallback in case Gmail ever explodes or disappears suddenly, which would probably have more adverse affects on the economy than on our petty email threads.
If you use Gmail for your primary email provider I would suggest scheduling your own backup if you do not already do so. Lifehacker.com has a great tutorial to get you started on a Windows machine as well as a Linux-based machine (you can just follow the command line steps to configure and run fetchmail). Better safe than sorry.
As an aside - does anyone know of a PHP-based script that can accomplish this same task? Being a Web developer it would be great to run this from our Web server without installing Cygwin.
Tags: backup, email, fetchmail, gmail
About the Author
Josh has been developing applications and Web sites for the past 10 years. He has received college-credit courses at Villa Julie College in Computer Information Systems, Howard Community College in Business Entrepreneurship, and has completed the A+ Certification program at UMBC. His background in development includes content management systems, real estate listing updates, data embedding, merchant services integration, e-commerce and desktop application development. Josh has had the privilege of working with local, national and international companies including the Wall Street Institute, Care Improvement Plus, Signs By Tomorrow, Pazo Restaurant, St. John Properties and Bin604 among others. His free time is spent playing video games, writing music and raising his dog, Butters.
