Comments on: GMail IMAP Backup With mbsync on Ubuntu

By: Jarno Rantanen

Jarno Rantanen — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:14:48 +0000

Thanks a lot for a quality post! This got me right on the way for setting up my own local backup of my (non-gmail) IMAP account.

You might want to update the info about fetching local copies of the certs though; as Brandon Hall pointed out it’s not actually necessary.

By: Mike Smullin

Mike Smullin — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 16:27:31 +0000

Thunderbird 3 does this really well. Just add your IMAP account. The default under Storage for each account is to download all content and cache locally forever. Then go to File > Offline > Download & Sync and it will go through all your accounts and all folders and download them to the local cache. Then you can go into Work Offline mode and read all your email to verify its all there.

Then as you use Thunderbird its updating its cache, but you can always force a fresh sync with above steps.

By: KeithS

KeithS — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 04:08:19 +0000

Thanks for this! Your patch worked perfectly against the isync-1.0.4 package available for download from Sourceforge. With a little tweaking to set up the configuration file the way I like it, it’s synchronizing nicely.

By: Muc

Muc — Sun, 22 May 2011 15:22:42 +0000

Great post! Thank you very much. Just followed the steps and worked like a charm :)

I had a little trouble, for I’m using linux mint Julia, which apparently doesn’t include any sources source (no deb sources in sources.list), so I had to manually download the sources for mbsync, but other than that, very straightforward.

By: ehznewehznew

ehznewehznew — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:02:23 +0000

I’m not scared at all.

Aperture sucks!

By: Craig Betts

Craig Betts — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 04:38:53 +0000

With the big scare that hit Google today with a mass of missing emails, I was able to use your setup with no hiccups! Apparently mbsync didn’t need the patch for the recursive directories. I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and loaded the isync package as is.

Thank

By: My quest to setup a good gmail archive system | JCStorm

My quest to setup a good gmail archive system | JCStorm — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:40:15 +0000

[...] http://www.chrisstreeter.com/archive/2009/04/305/gmail-imap-backup-with-mbsync-on-ubuntu [...]

By: Philipp

Philipp — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:20:34 +0000

Hello Pete,
as you refered to my blog post, I want to inform you that my blog moved. The post is now online at the new address:

http://blog.philippklaus.de/2010/02/offlineimap-have-a-local-copy-of-your-mail/

Hope it is of some use.
Philipp

By: remke

remke — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 20:25:56 +0000

I have installed isync using ubuntu 10.10:
A)
sudo aptitude search libdb-dev
-> sudo aptitude install libdb-dev
B)
sudo aptitude search libssl
-> sudo aptitude install libssl-dev
C)
sudo apt-get source isync

wget http://www.chrisstreeter.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/recursive_imap_ubuntu.patch
tar -xvf isync_1.0.4.orig.tar.gz
cd isync-1.0.4/
sudo patch -p1 < ../recursive_imap_ubuntu.patch
D)
sudo ./configure && sudo make && sudo make install
E)
sudo mkdir -p /export/backups/mail

(my user is member of the group users …); you need an writable location for the user performing the gmail backup !
sudo chown -R :users /export/backups

sudo chmod g+s /export/backups/mail/

…
continue with step (5)
:) ~remke

By: Guy

Guy — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:38:51 +0000

Thanks, Chris. This worked really well for me. Exactly what I was wanting to do.