I only save financial statements and contact information. Everything else gets deleted as soon as possible.
What's the advantage to deleting? It's easy to ignore anything old and disk space is cheap. Do you delete old photos?
If she was hard-deleting everything, she wasn't just Inbox Zero, she was F---s Zero, too.
Back when I used Gmail I just kept everything personal and work related but when I moved away and started paying for email storage I took a different approach. It didn’t make sense for me to pay considerably more storage for something I almost never use.
I ended up backing up all of my emails outside of the last 5 years and stored them on an offline drive where I can reference them as eml files if I ever need it.
Going forward once a year I’ll export and purge the oldest year in my account.
Also, oftentimes I search email not so much for the content, but to find the timestamp associated with a particular event. I have had to search old email metadata a few times when I get an unexpected question related to time (for example, gmail will ask when you created the account as part of its account recovery process).
I do have “Clean Inbox”[1] because I don’t see or interact with them, but I keep them. The only emails I see are the actionable “Unread OR Flagged.”
Old SMS, iMessage, Telegram etc messages have been useful from time to time too for similar reasons.
Both can also serve as exceptional time capsules that provide windows into past “eras” of life. I occasionally kick myself for not having archived mail and messages from a couple of defunct email addresses and chat apps… without them there’s a hole spanning a few years where visibility is limited.
As I'm sure the author is aware, Restic will do hash-based chunking so that similar files can be efficiently be backed up.
How similar are two successive Takeout mboxes?
If the order of messages within an mbox is stable, and new emails are inserted somewhere, the delta update might be tiny.
Even if the order of the mbox's messages are ~random, Restic's delta updates will forego large attachments.
It would be great to see empirical figures here: how large is the incremental backup after after a month's emails. How does that compare for each backup strategy?
The pro of sticking with restic is simplicity, and also avoiding the risk of your tool managing to screw up the data.
This risk isn't so bad if it's a mature tool that canonicalises mboxes (e.g. order them by time), but seems risky for something handrolled.
For the email accounts I want a backup, I set it to spew out POP3 without doing anything (don’t mark read or delete). I set up Thunderbird with that POP3. It has a backup copy of all the emails. I’ve had searchable emails since like 2004/2005, and I’ve occasionally replied to people and gotten back in touch with very old friends from the Internet.
I saw an open-source tool sometime back (I think, here on Hacker News) that backs up your IMAP mails with a nicely done interface. That would be nice to have.
Edit: Perhaps Bichon,[1] mentioned somewhere in the other comment threads[2] was the one.
pbhn•4d ago
venusenvy47•47m ago
https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon