How to copy all the contents of one's Gmail online a/c onto computer or other personal physical storage media.

[Our Man in the Tropics]

Dear Fellow Thaivisa.com Posters,

 

Ahead of resuming a thread I started about "clean"-installing new operating systems [ MS Windows 10 ] onto various notebook computers,- I am taken up with :

 

1_

backing up all my off-line data

 

2_

trying to successfully back-up my Gmail contents.

 

 

I followed this route for 2_ [ above ]

 

https://www.wikihow.tech/Back-Up-Your-Gmail-Account

 

Eventually I have a WinRAR.ZIP Archive stored on 1 of my notebooks.

 

I tried to access likely contenders with the WinRAR.ZIP Archive Folder for having my emails ;

However, selecting those that I did results in :

 

Dialogue Box requesting permission from me to search WWW for suitable application to complete the viewing of the particular data

A request which I do not agree with ;

Lest my personal data is hacked etc.

 

What is a perplexed Falang to do ?

 

 

Thanking yee all in advance for your constructive replies,

 

 

Regards,

 

 

Our Man in the Tropics

[KittenKong]

You dont actually need to back-up your Gmail data as Google stores it for you.

 

When you set up your new or freshly re-installed operating system, just log into your Gmail account with a browser and away you go.

 

However, if you do want to have a local copy of your Gmail for offline reading or backup purposes, just install an IMAP email client (Thunderbird is a good choice, though there are others) and enter your Gmail account details (email address and password). The client will download all your emails to local folders which you can backup to any storage you like, but it will also leave all the email on Google's servers. You will probably find Thunderbird much faster and more satisfactory to use than webmail on a browser, and it certainly has a lot more options.

 

Various support pages that explain this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=use+imap+with+gmail

 

If you just want a decent free programme to open ZIP files, install 7-Zip. But the content of your saved zip file will not be much use to you due to the way email data is stored.