Your Email Is in the Cloud. That Isn't a Backup.

Keeping your email in Gmail, Outlook.com or Microsoft 365 is not the same as having a backup. Your provider stores one copy of your mailbox, the current one, and keeps every device in sync with it. When a message disappears from that copy, whether you deleted it, someone broke into your account, or the account was closed, it disappears everywhere. A backup is a second copy that lives outside the provider and doesn’t follow those changes.

Most people assume the opposite, so it’s worth walking through why.

Sync is not a backup

Your phone and your laptop show the same inbox because they both talk to the same server, usually over IMAP. That’s convenient, and it’s exactly what makes it a poor backup: deletions sync too. Delete a folder on your laptop and it’s gone from your phone and the web a few seconds later.

Providers are very good at protecting their servers from their own failures, like dead drives or a data center going dark. What they don’t protect you from is what happens inside your account. Emptying the trash is a valid command, whether you sent it or someone else did with your password.

Five ways to lose email that the cloud won’t stop

1. A deletion you notice too late

Gmail keeps trashed messages for up to 30 days. After that, or as soon as you empty the trash, the message is deleted permanently, and Google says plainly that you can’t recover it. Outlook.com gives you a bit more room: Deleted Items empties itself after 30 days, and items removed from that folder can be recovered for another 30.

The trouble is that nobody misses an email the next day. You go looking months later, when someone asks for an invoice, a signed agreement or an old thread with a client, and by then the window has closed.

2. Closure for inactivity

Accounts you stop using expire. Google may delete a personal account that has been inactive for two years, along with its content, after sending warning emails. Microsoft’s Services Agreement is stricter: you need to sign in to your Microsoft account at least once every two years, and to your Outlook.com inbox at least once a year, or they’ll close it.

This mostly hits old accounts you no longer check but whose mail still matters: your college address, your first job, the one the family used.

3. A suspended account

Google can disable an account it believes broke its policies, and when that happens you can’t sign in to Google services, Gmail included. You can appeal, but you’re locked out while it’s reviewed, and Google notes that in some cases you can’t even download your data.

You don’t have to do anything wrong for this to happen to you. A false positive or some unusual sign-in activity can be enough to keep you out for days. Or for good.

4. A hijacked account

Anyone who signs in with your password has the same powers you do. They can delete whole folders, empty the trash, set up rules that delete incoming mail, or change the password so you can’t get back in. To the provider, all of that looks like normal activity from the account owner.

Even after you recover the account, whatever was deleted in the meantime may already be past the trash window.

5. An infected computer

If malware takes over your computer, it also has access to your email client, which is signed in to your account. Whatever it deletes or damages there syncs to the server as if you’d done it yourself. The cloud can’t tell a deletion you meant from one you didn’t.

The providers say so themselves

This isn’t just our take. Microsoft’s Services Agreement, which covers Outlook.com, says it twice: “You should have a regular backup plan” and “We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data.” When the company holding your mail tells you to keep your own copy, take the hint.

Business accounts on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 are similar. Your admin may have retention or archiving tools, but that depends on the plan and how it’s set up. The principle is the same: the provider keeps the service running, and your data is your responsibility.

What a real backup needs

To get you out of the five situations above, a backup has to check a few boxes:

• It lives outside the provider. On your own disk, a NAS or separate cloud storage, not in another folder of the same account.
• It doesn’t copy deletions. When a message vanishes from the server, the backup keeps it. That’s the opposite of sync.
• It runs on its own. A backup that depends on you remembering ends up with months-long gaps.
• It uses a format you can open. If reading it requires one specific program that might not exist next year, you’ve just moved the problem.
• You’ve tested it. A backup you’ve never opened is an assumption.

Manual exports from the provider, such as Google Takeout, give you a snapshot at a point in time. They’re worth doing now and then, but they don’t repeat themselves, and a lot can happen between two of them.

How Arca handles it

Arca Mail Backup connects to your account over IMAP (Gmail and Google Workspace with an app password; Outlook.com, Hotmail and Microsoft 365 by signing in with Microsoft; any other provider with its server, username and password) and backs up your mail in the background to a disk you choose. Mail deleted on the server stays in your backup, marked as deleted, and you can search for it and restore it to the same account. Restored messages go into a new folder, and nothing already on the server is touched.

Everything is saved as standard mbox files, one per folder and month, which open in Thunderbird, Apple Mail or MBox Viewer Pro without Arca. There’s no server of ours in the middle, and your passwords stay in the Windows Credential Manager or the macOS Keychain. It backs up email only, not calendars or contacts.

The free plan covers one account, backed up in full to an internal or external disk. Pro adds more accounts and lets you save to a NAS or S3-compatible storage such as Wasabi or Backblaze B2. Details are on the pricing page, and common questions are answered in the FAQ.

The Windows version is out now in the Microsoft Store. The Mac version is in the Mac App Store.