In this blog post, let’s discuss the best methods to back up gmail emails with attachments to your hard drive, flash drive, or computer.
There are so many users of gmail email clients all over the world. In many cases, users want to create a backup of their essential gmail emails and store it somewhere else. for example, some of the emails contain sensitive business-related information, legal information, or any personal information. you may want to create a backup if you want to switch to any other email service providers like outlook, yahoo, etc.
In some cases, you may want to back up all mail locally to your flash drive, external drive, or system.
So, without wasting any more time, let’s discuss the safe methods you can use to archive or save gmail emails with attachments to a hard drive, flash drive, or other external drives.
methods to save/backup gmail emails with attachments to computer or external drive.
method 1: using the google takeout tool
with the help of google takeout you can download a copy of data from google products like gmail, youtube, calendar etc. in the computer. but it is only beneficial if you want to export only a few files or emails along with the attachments. If you are dealing with a large number of emails, then it will take you a lot of time to save that many emails with the help of google takeout.
let’s see how google takeout works. The entire procedure is classified into three main steps.
step 1: open google takeout & select gmail
- in the gmail account, click on the google account
- a new tab will open, where you should choose data & customization.
- go to data & personalization page; there is a section to download, delete or make a plan for your information. here, you need to select the option to download your data.
- all products will be selected by default. therefore, deselect all the selected data.
- check the box corresponding to the mail and click all the included mail data to open the content box of the mail. Here, all the labels and the default gmail folder are displayed, and you can select any folder and export its data to mbox format. then click ok.
- now click next to go to the next step.
step 2: choose the file format according to your needs
- in the delivery method menu, you have four options like
*send download link by email,
#add to drive, add to dropbox
*add to onedrive,
#add to box
about these, google will send you a file link. here, you can choose to send download link by email.
- Now select the type of zip or tgz file for the file you want to save to your desktop. zip can be easily accessible on any windows platform, while to open the tgz file, the additional program is needed.
- Now select the size of the compressed file. large files will be split when the data exceeds the selected file size limit. then click the create file button.
step 3: creation & download archive file
- in the file management section, click download.
- as soon as you click the download button, you will be redirected to a new tab where it will ask you for a password. simply enter the password and click next. the archive file downloaded directly to the system.
- also, the archive file link already sent to your inbox which can work for a week. it means you can download the zip file again within the next seven days from its creation using this link.
- once you’ve got the zip file, extract it. the attached file is available in mbox format. now you can import this mbox file into your compatible mail application and view the mail along with its attachments on your system.
method 2: using a third-party gmail backup tool
method 2: using a third-party gmail backup tool
The above process is time consuming and takes practice when you are dealing with many gmail files you need to save. I suggest you use a third-party gmail backup tool to save gmail emails to computer.
This gmail backup tool allows you to export gmail account data items like contacts, calendar, google drive data to computer, external hard drives, usb drive, etc. Gmail emails can be directly imported into Outlook, Thunderbird, Yahoo, etc. both on windows and mac os. This smart gmail backup tool allows users to export gmail emails to pst, pdf, emlx, eml, txt, mbox, html and other file formats.
You can also backup gmail emails with attachments to computer system, external hard drive or usb drive. the tool is designed with a user-friendly graphical user interface and is easy to use. this tool works well for both windows and mac users.
you can follow below steps to use gmail backup software.
1# Start the gmail backup tool on your system.
2# select the file format in which you want to save gmail emails.
3# Browse to the location where you want to save gmail emails with all attachments.
4# Use the date range feature to select gmail files for backup.
5# choose the naming convention option to rename the resulting emails after the backup.
6# finally click ok to close the application.
conclusion
In this blog post, I discussed a manual method with the help of google takeout to backup gmail emails with attachments to computer or external hard drive. but this method has its limitation as it is more suitable for smaller number of gmail emails. Therefore, the best way to save gmail emails to external hard drive or computer is to use gmail backup tool, which can save or archive single or multiple gmail emails easily.
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