UPDATE: Check out Mailstore Home – a standalone repository/archive for your web email accounts. Set it up to grab all your email and it creates an archive on your hard drive.

You probably heard that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Google Mail users logged on to their accounts at the weekend to discover their accounts had gone AWOL. Google is attempting to remedy the situation, but it does reinforce the need to keep a backup of your cloud data, just in case.

You can use IMAP to sync a Google account with an email program, such as Thunderbird, on your computer and set it to save a copy of emails on your hard drive. You can also download all your mail using POP3 without interfering with your Google Mail labels.

Alternatively, you can use TrueSwitch to copy your GMail account to a Hotmail or Windows Live account. Although you won’t make the switch, just use the copy as a backup. You can also get a year’s free use of Backupify at the moment if you use the coupon code “savegmail”, and backup everything to their service.

If you use belt and braces your trousers are unlikely to fall down.

Related articles

• Lost E-Mail? Google Investigates Gmail Problem (abcnews.go.com)
• Google restores missing G-mails (bbc.co.uk)
• Google reviving users’ deleted Gmail e-mails (sfgate.com)
• Google Gmail Outage Leaves 150,000 Users Without E-mail (pcworld.com)
• Backup GMail Emails Online (labnol)