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Valid point. I'm backing up my google drive to my NAS for the same reason and I should do the same with the email accounts in our families google workspace domain.

We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD] so my son can have a really nice firstname@lastname.at address which in itself seems valuable these days.

I'm also worried that if he gets the account too soon and does some kind of unintended wipe, all data is lost so maybe the backup is the way to go



> We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD

Been planning to do this for my family as well. But after my (admin) passing, and with multiple children sharing the same domain name, one of my children will have to be the domain admin for everyone in the family. This might be fine if they remain in good terms and have enough trust of the admin to not screw their primary online identity...

I have yet to figure this part of the equation out.


I don't think that family member should be taught to treat this as a burden. Make them treat it as a professional work that has to be done or in absense of that, "teach" some other family member to take the torch.

I have a family member who I have been slowly teaching about tech. Not the how to run a server but the ideas and sometimes the specifics of something.

Most of the time they I force them to "figure it themselves" which has taught them more than tutorials ever could.


My concern was more about trust and goodwill towards whoever ended up as the admin / custodian of the domain name


Fastmail is a fantastic and inexpensive alternative to gmail.


Love Fastmail. It really is fast, sometimes feels like 2 or 3x quicker to get emails than Gmail.


One cool thing about Fastmail is you can have multiple domains and email addresses, for the price of a single user.

e.g.

certificateexpiry@mydomain.com

ceo@coolstuff.com

support@coolstuff.com

info@hitmeup.com

...all funneling into your inbox.

We were spending way too much money on GSuite before realising this.


You can do this with Groups in Google Workspace pretty easily.


What’s your Google backup strategy? Last time I looked it required periodic manual steps.


Not OP, but I have a Google Apps Script running on daily schedule which extracts every email older than 30 days as .eml file, renames it as YYYY MM DD HH MM SS SUBJECT.eml, saves in a Google Drive Folder with YYYY as subfolder. Drive itself is synced instantly with my hard drive, and I backup that drive occasionally (like around 3 to 5 weeks) to another local & rclone to Dropbox.

30 days so that I can have enough time to delete it. Trash & Spam is excluded, and every successful downloaded email is labeled to prevent it getting downloaded again in next run.

Originally 4 years ago when I started this script, it was timing out because of about 15 years of emails. I ran it for 6 minutes only, every hour. Now once it caught up, it needs only few seconds, and there are only like 5 to 20 emails caught in its daily net.


Any chance you can share that script?


Sure, I will post it on Gitlab, n will let you know. Need sometime to remove my own folder keys and stuff. Lots of things are simply hard coded.

This post was my inspiration:

https://www.labnol.org/code/download-gmail-eml-201028


Plain mbsync works fine for email with an app password. APIs are there for contacts & calendar backup. I haven't tried backing up the rest.


Convoluted but works for me: IMAP via Thunderbird then exporting the contents locally





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