Is it possible to directly backup gmail with rclone?

Help and Support
1

I am not a gmail user but I am very interested in providing a recipe to rsync . net customers that will allow them to back up (and then snapshot/archive/etc.) their gmail accounts to their rsync.net cloud storage account.

I think that there is not a direct function to fetch gmail contents with rclone - is that correct ?

Is that feature on the roadmap ?

I also think that there is a way to link ones gmail account into ones gdrive (again, bear with me - I am not a gmail user) and then you could download the gmail account, through gdrive, with rclone ... correct ?

Any comments or suggestions appreciated - if we can dial in this recipe we will write the help/howto page on rsync.net in a general way that is useful to everyone, not just our customers ...

Thanks.

2

That is correct and it isn't something we've thought about before as gmail isn't a general purpose cloud storage system.

If you could get your gmail backing up to your drive then you could certainly access it with rclone but I couldn't see an easy way of doing it.

Using google takeout looks like the best way of backing up gmail

I wonder if that can be automated...

Using https://takeout.google.com you can schedule a backup every 2 months for a year to google drive which would be a start, but not a great backup.

I think takeout is very hard to automate according to what I've been reading.

3

OK, thank you.

So there is not a good, repeatable (automated) workflow here, but if I understand what you are saying, in a pinch, I could just dump my gmail to google drive, via "google takeout" and then back up all of google drive with rclone, correct ?

4

Yes that would work and be a lot better than nothing.

Gmail does have an API so you could back it up like that. There may be a tool to help with that but I couldn't find one.

5

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