This post comes to tell you the 5 best ways to backup Gmail emails to hard drive. The 5 ways include exporting Gmail emails to PDF, downloading emails from Gmail on phone, and using Google Takeout to export emails. If you need them, read further!
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Different users may have various reasons to backup Gmail emails to hard drive. Here we just list the 3 common ones to illustrate the necessity.
MultCloud is a free cloud-management service and supports adding various cloud drives and email clients for centralization. To download Gmail emails, you can use its new and professional function called "Email Download".
Before following the steps, it would be better to plug your external hard drive into your computer if you want to export Gmail emails to external hard drive. By default, these Gmail emails will be downloaded into the Downloads folder on your computer, if you want to export Gmail emails to your external hard drive, you have to move them to the external disk then, or you can change the download destination to the hard drive in your browser settings.
Step 1: Open MultCloud and click "Get started for free" for a new MultCloud account.
Step 2: Click "Add Email" and select the Gmail icon. After you log in to your Gmail account, Gmail is added to MultCloud successfully.
Note: If you also want to download Outlook emails to a hard drive, choose Outlook instead.
Step 3: Enter Gmail by clicking it in the left sidebar and select the folders or emails that you are willing to download.
Step 4: Tap "Download" and name the PDF or package. If you need to save attachments or choose other settings, you can tick the options. If not, click "OK" and finish your operations.
Note: Every month you can convert at most 50 emails into PDFs. If you run out of the 50-email amount, you can upgrade to a premium plan to unlock unlimited conversion and download up to 200 emails at the same time.
Download Settings:
Step 1: Add Gmail and a cloud drive (Dropbox for example) to MultCloud after having an account.
Step 2: Click "Email Migration" and choose Gmail in the FROM box and Dropbox in the TO box. Then click "Migrate Now" to save Gmail emails to Dropbox.
Tips:
Also, you can use Google Takeout to save Gmail emails to hard drive because Gmail is one of Google’s apps. That means this way is particularly designed for Gmail instead of other email servers and it can’t be universally used. Besides, Google Takeout will hint to you that the downloading process may take hours or even days until it is fully complete, so the transfer speed is not very fast.
Step 1: Sign in to your Google account and choose "Data & Privacy" in the left bar. Then scroll down the page until you see "Download your data" under "Download or delete your data" and click on it.
Step 2: Click "Deselect all", scroll down the page to find "Mail", and tick the box next to it. Then you need to continue scrolling down the page and click "Next step".
Step 3: Choose "Send download link via email". Then select the Frequency and File type & size, and click "Create export".
Step 4: Turn to your Gmail and download the emails from the link to your hard drive.
Since Gmail can be used on computers and phones, and the steps are different from each other, Here we will separately show you the download ways. Before following the steps, there is one thing that you need to know. You can only download one email as a PDF through the Gmail Print feature.
Step 1: Open your desired email in Gmail and click the printer-shaped icon or the 3-dot icon (since the print icon may be missing sometimes) in the upper-right corner.
Step 2: Choose "Save as PDF" in the Destination bar and click on "Save".
Step 3: In the pop-up window, select your hard drive to receive this email and click "Save". Then you can check your hard drive to see if there is a new PDF file.
Step 1: Open the Gmail app on your phone and choose the email you want to download.
Step 2: Click the 3-dot icon in the upper-right corner and select "Print all" in the menu.
Step 3: Click the share icon and choose "Save to Files". After choosing which folder to save this email, click "Save" and this email is downloaded to your phone's hard drive.
Additionally, you can backup Gmail to Outlook first and then save the emails to a hard drive. But this way is more complex since it has more steps.
Step 1: Sign in to your Outlook and go to Settings. Then select "View all Outlook settings".
Step 2: Click Mail in the left bar, choose Sync email, and select Gmail.
Step 3: Enter a Display name and choose "Connect your Google account so we can import your email from Gmail" and "Create a new folder for imported email, with subfolders like in Gmail". Then click "OK".
Step 4: Log in to the Gmail account which you want to export emails from and click "Allow".
Step 5: Download the emails (They will be converted as PST files after the above steps.) to your hard drive.
All these 5 ways are free and easy to use, so you can choose a preferred one to save Gmail emails to hard drive. But the first way is recommended because it can be used for other email servers like Outlook. Besides, this method can download emails in bulk as well as convert them to PDFs.
What’s more, you can try other functions to solve some cloud-to-cloud problems like how to sync Google Drive with OneDrive. By MultCloud Cloud Sync, this problem can be solved with simple operations and fast speed.