From Leo's mailbag:
> From: A Computer User
> Sent: April 24, 2007
> To: Ask Leo!
> Subject: backing up server based email
>
> Leo,
> Excellent job you do here. Congratulations and thank you. Now, here is
> my question: How can I make and keep a backup of an outside server.
>
> Here is the situation: I have an extenal mail service with 1and1. I can
> keep up to 1 GB of data in the mailbox. I access this mailbox with the
> IMAP protocol.
>
> My hardware are linux boxes. sorry, no microsoft :-) anyway, I would
> like to keep a backup of the thousands of mails that I have on the
> 1and1 server.
>
> Why don't I have the mails all at home on my linux box? The connection
> isn't all that great and I want to be sure I have access to my emails
> 24/7 from anywhere I just am. So 1and1 gives me a much better access.
>
> I recently deleted accidently my fax-inbox. I lost hunderts of faxes.
> 1and1 told me that they do not keep a backup of my data. So, I like to
> prevent this situation in the future... but how????
There's no "easy" solution that comes immediately to mind.
Some free services, like GMail, will allow you to import mail from another
service. You might sign up for that and see if it will transfer over all
your existing mail, or only show you new mail.
Similarly, you could set up a forwarding rule so that all new mail gets
autoforwarded to a backup account like GMail. I have several friends who
do this. But that only forwards mail recieved after you set it up.
Other alternatives get geekier. You could get a cheap hosting plan on
another linux server making sure you get a lot of space with it, and then
use rsync to copy files from your mail server (assuming you can locate the
mail store) to your own server. Since that'd be server to server, it'd
be faster than trying to download it all.
I have a couple of clients with dedicated servers and we do something very
similar - copying all their email and websites to another server nightly.
Good luck!
Thanks for asking,
Leo
Article 1566
| Category:
EMail
