Diran Afarian's Blog

Make sure to note where the downloaded file is.

1. Go to the folder within Windows where you downloaded the file and “Extract All Files” of the zip file
2. If you are familiar with DOS commands, then feel free to skip to #5
3. Open your Command Prompt: (Start->Run->cmd) for XP, (Start button and then type cmd in run, or in the search window) for Windows 7.
4. Go to the folder where the downloaded and extracted file is.
   (Here is a small primer on DOS commands to move through directories):
   • You will probably get a C:\AndSomethingHere\> when you first open the Command Prompt.
   • So you can navigate to your folder by typing in cd\YourFolder then press Return/Enter.
   • So if your folder is “foo” then you type cd\foo then press Return/Enter.
   • So if your folder is “foo\foo-1” then you type cd\foo\foo-1 then press Return/Enter.
5. Run the following command (Using your own directories and folders of course) to make it easier I will just use a mythical folder called “foo”, “foo-1” and GYB_GotYourBack as my folders, etc.:
   1. C:\>cd\foo\foo-1\
   2. C:\foo\foo-1\>gyb.exe –email=YourEmail@Address.com –action=backup
6. This will download the “All Mails” folder by defaultand all of the contents. If you want to limit choices (Like local folders or gmail folders etc. then if you type in gyb.exe at the Command Prompt window, it will give you all options that you can use)
7. The program will start to run and it will now create a folder called (GYB-GMail-Backup-YOUR-EMAIL@ADDRESS)
8. It will also start making folders (2003, 2004, 2005, etc) Depending on how old your emails are.
9. Then it will put each email in a folder corresponding to the month (1, 2, 3, … 12)
10. The files are .eml files so you can import them into outlook to have the backup
    (It also downloads all the files that are attached to the emails)
11. It will start and keep running, and if it encounters an error, don’t panic, it will keep retrying.

It takes about 30 minutes per 10,000 emails, of course this varies with large attached files. Mine took a bit over 4 hours, but I can sleep easy now, knowing I have it burned on a DVD and can find things if I have a catastrophic crash. I also don’t need to do the whole thing again, I can just go back to a certain date next time using the “–fast-incremental” choice to do only what’s not in the backup from last time. I would have preferred a date range, but This is still great.
 

I haven’t tried restoring the backup, because I have over 91,000 messages 🙂 but I did try a couple of individual “.EML” files that it had created from back in 2003-2004, and I imported it to an outlook app, and it imported it just fine. I purposefully did a couple that had attachments, and presto! I got the files and was able to download them.

 

Thank you guys (jay0lee & others at GitHub if they worked on it), you’re a lifesaver. If I lost my Gmail account content, I just don’t know what I can do. I have everything since 2003 in there.

 

I’m a happy camper.