It’s not happening again.

So after the fiasco earlier this month, I resolved that I'm keeping my own backups of everything. And since e-mail is what started the problems, e-mail is where I'm going to start too.

There are several good ways I could backup my e-mail. It'd be trivial to write scripts to tar up my mbox files every once in awhile and download them. Or I could rsync them to another account. However, I decided to go with a truly off-site backup, that was stored in a more usable format that I could search through immediately and restore piecewise if necessary. Aka GMail!

All I needed to do was setup a forwarder from my primary e-mail to my new backup GMail account. (I have a real GMail account for things that might spam me; this is a separate account.) Now I'm receiving mirrored copies of everything to that account. I don't need to do any spam prevention or anything, since I can search for whatever mail I need quickly and easily. And GMail has a much more lenient account dormancy policy— 9 months— than do most free mail providers.

All in all, I think it's going to be a fine solution… but let me know if I'm missing something ;) 

Dewdles by Sam