All companies, even the largest, are at risk of outages, and access to the Internet is never guaranteed. For those who store vital data using the cloud system instead of locally, this is always a potential problem. Gmail is the most popular mail system, but anyone using it for vital data flow can be concerned about outages and connection failures. Gmail Keeper offers peace of mind by regularly downloading your mail from Gmail, and storing it locally in compressed files.
Gmail Keeper is not an email client; it just downloads Gmail per your instructions. Mail downloads can be filtered in a number of ways, including by label, mailbox, date or time periods. You can use a number of different profiles in order to back up multiple Gmail accounts, or do a monthly ‘major backup’ and a daily ‘vital backup’.
Although mail clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook Express can also do this, Gmail Keeper does have some features that set it apart. It’s compact and small, as it’s not a whole email program. It stores files using zip compression, to use less storage space. You can protect the files with passwords, and profiles and backups can be filtered in a number of different ways, rather than having to manually sort through emails.
Mail backups can also be restored, and migrated to new profiles or accounts. This is very useful when doing a mass migration of data, or if you’ve suffered loss of data via hacking or careless deletion.
Gmail Keeper does have a few strange quirks. It can warn that there’s not enough space for backups, even though there’s ample space available. This is possibly due to the limitation for a single zip file of 64K items. The price is also a bit higher than you might expect for a program with one main advantage, even if it is a really good advantage, especially when there are some options that provide at least some of the functionality, such as Google’s option for ‘offline access’, or a POP mailer.
If you don’t want to use a POP mailer, or if the restorations and filtering options are something you might want or need, then Gmail Keeper might be the right choice for you, particularly if you’re on the road a lot and might have problems connecting to the Internet or accessing your mail.