How to Back Up Gmail to Your Computer (2026 Guide)

To back up Gmail to your computer you need three things: 2-Step Verification on your Google Account, an app password, and a program that downloads your mail over IMAP and saves it to your drive. IMAP is now always on for personal accounts, so the Gmail side takes about five minutes. The part worth thinking through is which folders to copy, because Gmail labels don’t behave like normal folders, and it’s easy to end up storing every message two or three times.

If you’re wondering why you’d bother when your mail is already at Google, we covered that in Your Email Is in the Cloud. That Isn’t a Backup.

What changed in Gmail

Since January 2025, Gmail no longer lets you turn IMAP on or off for personal accounts. It’s always enabled. Plenty of older guides still send you looking for that switch; you won’t find it, and you don’t need it.

What you do still need, for any program that doesn’t use Sign in with Google, is an app password, and that requires 2-Step Verification.

Step by step

1. Turn on 2-Step Verification

Go to myaccount.google.com/security, find 2-Step Verification and turn it on. If it’s already on, which is common these days, move on.

One catch: if your account uses 2-Step Verification with security keys only, or you’re enrolled in Advanced Protection, Google doesn’t offer app passwords. On Google Workspace accounts (work or school), it depends on whether your admin allows them.

2. Create an app password

Go to myaccount.google.com/apppasswords, give it a name you’ll recognize, like “Email backup,” and Google shows you a 16-character code. Copy it right away; it won’t be shown again.

Worth knowing: when you change your Google Account password, all your app passwords are revoked. You’ll need to create a new one and update your backup program, or backups will quietly stop.

3. Check the folder size limit

In Gmail, open Settings, then See all settings, then the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab. Near the bottom is Folder size limits. For a complete backup it has to be set to not limit the number of messages. If you ever changed it to speed up a phone, your backup program will only see the most recent few thousand messages in each folder, and the backup will be incomplete without any warning.

4. Check which labels show in IMAP

On the Labels tab in settings, every label has a “Show in IMAP” checkbox. An unchecked label simply doesn’t exist for outside programs. For a full backup, make sure at least these are checked:

• All Mail, which is where all your mail actually lives.
• Trash and Spam, if you want to keep them.
• Any of your own labels you want to see organized in the backup.

5. Pick where the backup goes

An external drive is the simplest choice and protects you if your computer fails. To size it, check how much Gmail uses in your Google storage (that total includes Drive and Photos too) and leave some headroom.

6. Connect the account and run the first backup

In your backup program, add the Gmail account with your address and the app password from step 2. Choose the destination and start.

The first run is the slow one. Google caps how much you can download over IMAP each day (on Google Workspace it’s 2,500 MB per day), so a mailbox of many gigabytes can take several days to copy in full. After that, each run only fetches what’s new and finishes quickly.

7. Check that the backup works

Don’t wait until you need it. Search for a specific old email, open one of the saved files in another program, and make sure the folders you expected are there. If Trash or Spam is missing, go back to step 4.

Why back up All Mail and not every label

In Gmail a message isn’t “in” a folder; it has labels. One email can carry Inbox, Clients and Invoices at once, and over IMAP Gmail presents it as if it sat in three separate folders. A program that copies every folder one by one downloads and stores that message three times. Over years of mail, the backup can grow to two or three times the size it needs to be, and take that much longer.

The clean approach is to copy All Mail, which holds each message exactly once, and record separately which labels each message has. Nothing is duplicated and your organization survives.

There’s one exception to keep in mind: All Mail doesn’t include Trash or Spam. Back up only All Mail and anything in the trash is left out, and the trash is often where the messages people regret losing end up. Trash is worth including every time. Spam is optional; most people don’t need it, though a legitimate message does land there now and then.

What about Google Takeout?

Google Takeout exports your Gmail as an .mbox file. It’s free and official, and it’s a good way to capture your mailbox at a point in time. What it doesn’t do is repeat itself: every export has to be requested, prepared by Google and downloaded by hand. Whatever arrives or gets deleted between two exports isn’t saved anywhere.

If you already have an export, two apps of ours help you make use of it, both for Mac and Windows. Takeout usually arrives split into several huge ZIP files, and Takeout Reports, which is free, tells you what’s inside (messages, senders, labels, years) without unzipping anything or going online. To read Gmail’s .mbox, search it and open attachments without importing it into a mail client, there’s MBox Viewer Pro.

For a backup that stays current you need something that works over IMAP on a schedule. The two go well together.

Common problems

• “Invalid username or password”: almost always the regular Google password instead of the app password, or an app password that was revoked when the account password changed.
• Older messages are missing: check the folder size limit (step 3).
• A whole label is missing: it’s unchecked under “Show in IMAP” (step 4).
• The first backup stops partway: likely the daily download cap. If your program resumes where it left off, just give it time.

How Arca does it

Arca Mail Backup connects to Gmail and Google Workspace over IMAP with an app password and saves your mail to an internal or external drive as standard mbox files, one per folder and month, alongside a manifest.json and a copy of the index. For Gmail it backs up All Mail plus labels, so nothing is stored twice. Trash is included by default and Spam is your call. It backs up email only, not calendars or contacts.

Backups run in the background and pick up where they left off if interrupted. Anything you delete in Gmail stays in your backup, marked as deleted, and you can find it and restore it to the same account in a new folder. Already have a Takeout export? You can import it for free and search it.

The free plan covers one account. Pro adds more accounts and lets you save to a NAS or S3-compatible storage; see pricing.

Arca for Windows is in the Microsoft Store. The Mac version is in the Mac App Store.