Gmail is a great web mail service and one of the most used as well. Although it’s quite feature rich and constantly evolving itself, one finds a number of auxiliary tools and services coming up to extend its functionality as required by its ever increasing vast user base. One such requirement is backup of Gmail mailboxes and restoring one Gmail account in another. This need might arise when someone has multiple Gmail accounts and want to consolidate all of them at one place and discard all other accounts. Other scenarios include having a backup offline on a computer which can then be restored at a later stage into any Gmail account or in a new one. There are a number of free utilities available which can provide such a facility and one of them is GMVault.

GMValut is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and once setup is complete for which complete guide is available online, it can be started with command line “gmvault” which shows its complete help. It’s really easy to get started as it takes just one command “sync” followed by email address to be backed up. Once authentication through password is done, GMValut downloads the entire contents of Gmail account over hard disk. Depending upon the data volume and internet speed, this might take some time. Multiple Gmail accounts can be downloaded in one location as well.

Once all the required accounts are backed up, restoration in a desired account can be performed using “restore” command followed by destination email address. For those concerned about security, access of GMVault to Gmail can always be turned off by going into Google account and removing GMVault which has to be added first time GMValut is used through explicit user permission.

Another method of accessing Gmail through GMVault is to enter password over command line. GMVault also keeps the user updated of the progress by first identifying the total number of emails to be downloaded and then showing the status email by email as they are archived. In order to save time, partial sync can also be performed using a quick option which backs up only two months of emails.

Other than GMVault, there’s another free utility called MailStore. Advantage of MailStore over GMVault is that of interface which is graphical and easy, but on the other hand it is available only for Windows. MailStore can be used with Outlook and Thunderbird as well in addition to Windows Live and provides search and export facility from within its interface.

Utilities such as GMValut and MailStore can come in handy for a variety of needs. Such as when email service needs to be changed from one free webmail provider to another, which is often not performed only because of the fact that previous service provider’s emails can not be accessed in the new service. Another need is search capability — the speed with which email data can be searched and accessed. Large files and old emails can be searched easily from offline archives without depending upon the internet connectivity. Next, offline archives can bring together emails from multiple accounts which is certainly not possible without such a tool.