Got Your Back (GYB) is a command line tool for backing up your Gmail messages to your local computer. It uses the standard IMAP protocol but also takes advantage of some custom Gmail IMAP extensions.
Learn more about how GYB works with the Getting Started Guide.
Download the latest GYB version from the Releases Page.
The code in this repo was cloned from the main got-your-back repo.
To get this to work I needed to fix some bugs. The following were implemented in two commits (7fa7f74, 0ae508d.
- On line 1489, commented out doGYBCheckForUpdates()
- Edited gyb.py, searched for "open(last_update_check_file" (there are 3 of them) and changed the 'rb' to 'r' or 'wb' to 'w'. The file it's trying to use is a text file, not a byte file. see #57
- Fixed error with restoring backup to new account see #51
- I also added Also added a print message so that I know which email is being loaded, allowing better troubleshooting
In addition you'll need to
- Run using python3
- Download six.py and save within this repo.
The instructions below assume you have two address email_old and email_new:
Estimate size of backup
python3 docs/got-your-back/gyb.py --email email_old --action estimate
Backup email_old, saving data into a folder called GYB-GMail-Backup-email_old
python3 docs/got-your-back/gyb.py --email email_old --action backup --local-folder GYB-GMail-Backup-email_old
Restore message to new account
python3 docs/got-your-back/gyb.py --email email_new --action restore --local-folder GYB-GMail-Backup-email_old