Link Safe

Keeping your email account backed up is easier if you use a webmail service such as Gmail, because your email messages, contacts and attachments are already saved in the cloud. One backup is not enough if you want to make sure that you’ll never lose that data, so it’s worth downloading a backup copy of your most important emails.

Google’s new Takeout backup service lets you download an archive copy of your most important Gmail data as a ZIP file. Only you can download your own data, and there are restrictions on how many archives you can create. Find out more in Google’s ‘Download your data FAQ’ (https://support.google.com/accounts).

The process is very simple, but it may take several hours for Google to create your archive, depending on how much data you want to download. Go to http://google.com/takeout, click ‘Create an archive’ and click Mail. All your Gmail labels are included in your archive by default, but you can choose to archive selected labels only. If you’ve been using Gmail for years, we’d recommend archiving one label at a time to avoid long downloads. Otherwise, archive all your labels, but empty Trash and Spam first.

When Google has finished archiving your chosen data, you can download it as a ZIP file from a secure page in your Google account. For extra security, the download link expires after a few days. Your ZIP isn’t automatically copied into Google Drive, so if you want to save it in the cloud, you’ll need to download it to your PC and then upload it to Google Drive, Dropbox or another secure storage service. Incidentally, Google has changed the American-sounding ‘Takeout’ to ‘Takeaway’ outside the US, but you’ll see both words used on different pages, and the URL still says ‘takeout’. Don’t let this confuse you: it’s very much one service.