Gamil backup

http://www.gmail-backup.com/download

free, clean of bugs, invaluable!

A slight proviso to this, I think inherent in H's use of the word "backup"...

I would NEVER use a web-site as the ONLY place I had stuff stored. As a backup fine as there is little chance that both your PC and a remote site will go tits-up on the same day.

Related topic to illustrate a point... a big growing trend (especially as a cost-saving measure in this recession) is the use of SaaS , software as a service whereby companies use web-served apps on a "pay-per-use" basis. Recently the vendor of such an app, a site I believe for photographers marketing and selling their work, went bust and the users woke up to a "you have X hours to retrieve your work before this site is gone forever" type message. Not easy when you are talking multi-Gb of graphics.

I'm not discouraging the recommendation of this post at all, offline storage is damned handy. But a general wakeup call up about backups... I like to have multiple copies of anything important. You'd be amazed how many quite significant businesses have been doing say tape backups for years, have never tested restoring them, and one day discover to their horror... the tape drives always were defective. In our case, wouldn't it be fun to discover that you have not one recoverable copy of the 100,000 word novel you wrote! It happens, trust me.

When I saw gamil, I was shocked! (is a rude word!)