How to Quickly Backup Files to Your Email

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If you’ve ever wanted a simpler solution to backing up your files online – this article is for you.

I currently use Gmail as a quick and dirty online backup solution where what I typically what I do is : Login to Gmail, attach the file, and then I email it to myself.

While quick, this is still a 3 step process… So here’s how to get it down to one move!

‘Backup to Email’ (BTE) is a great piece freeware which simplifies everything.  Just right click any file or folder, and select ‘Backup to Email’.  That’s it!

One thing I love about BTE is that it’s incredibly intuitive.  Here are some examples.

  • If you choose to upload a folder, the folder will be automatically zipped and backed up.
  • No limit on file / folder size.  Files/folders larger than 10MB will automatically be split to slices of 10MB, so your email can cope.  When you download the split files, you can easily join them up again with a feature that comes with BTE.
  • Easily manage of multiple email accounts to backup to
  • If the connection is disconnected at the middle of a file transfer, it initiates an auto-retry every 2 minutes

Looks like my quick and dirty backup solution just got quicker, but cleaner!

Bonus tip #1: Configure a Yahoo email account as your default backup account.  While Gmail currently offers more than 4.7Gigs of storage space, Yahoo Mail now offers unlimited space. 

Bonus tip #2: Setup email filters to automatically steer all your backups into a folder so it does not clog up your inbox.  Here are the instructions on how to do it for Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

(Backup to Email: BTE)

Do you backup your files online?  Let us know in the comments!

[tags] email, backup [/tags]

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10 Comments For This Post

  1. javi Says:
    November 7th, 2007 at 10:35 pm

    very useful tip! I’m backing up my gmail already! Thanks.

  2. stoneip Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 2:01 am

    is that any mac version?

  3. James Yeang Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 9:38 am

    @stoneip: Looks like it’s Windows only at this point…

    @Javi: Glad it helped!

  4. Syahid Ali Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 12:40 pm

    if you want some alternatives, you can use mozy home. It backups file automatically and you will have about 2GB to utilise online.

  5. nancy Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 5:58 am

    I tried to back my documents up to my gmail account by sending them as a attachments but when I tried to get them back, all the Word files were called “noname” and could not be opened. I think sometimes gmail can’t work with Word attachments I don’t think. Luckily, my .mac mail had saved all the attachments in the sent mail folder so I got everything back anyway, but make sure your backups are recoverable.

  6. James Yeang Says:
    November 12th, 2007 at 8:10 am

    Thanks for the input nancy, You tried the software, or did you do this on your own? I ask because I had no issue with word files…

  7. azamzaki Says:
    November 13th, 2007 at 2:37 am

    Great infos , keep on posting :)

  8. max Says:
    November 14th, 2007 at 12:17 am

    This doesn’t work. I’ve downloaded the software and done everything that the online manual suggests and I can’t backup a simple Word file.

    It is worthless to me and I’ll just have to uninstall it now.

  9. James Yeang Says:
    November 14th, 2007 at 7:24 am

    Sorry to hear that Max – looks like it may not work for some users because I still tested it again, and have no issues. I should note that Yahoo mail tends to take slightly longer before it shows up in your inbox, but Gmail should be pretty instant.

  10. www.gelder.tk Says:
    June 2nd, 2008 at 4:13 am

    @max
    maybe you forgot to switch on the pop function @ gmail.

    It even works fine for my own http://www.gelder.tk domain hosted by gmail

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