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This weekend I reviewed my email backup strategy and decided to make daily backups of all my accounts directly on my NAS. Since they are all Google-based, I went with gmvault on my Synology server. Here’s a walkthrough.

There are posts online that achieve this using ipkg and compiling dependencies. As of this writing (DSM v6), this is no longer needed.

Note: I’m using the root account because I am the only user of that server. Also, this lets me set up a crontab without reloading the cron service between shutdowns and reboots, due to Synology’s peculiar cron management system. Keep this in mind if you are on a shared NAS.

Make sure you checked the Gmail setup beforehand.

Initial Setup

  1. Log onto DSM, and install Python via the Package Manager.

  2. Enable SSH in the Control Panel, under “Terminal & SNMP”.

  3. Open a terminal and log in via SSH. You will be prompted for your password.

     ssh [email protected]

  4. Switch to root. Use your password again:

     sudo -i

  5. Download and install the Python Package Index:

     wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py && python get-pip.py

  6. Remove the pip setup script, and install gmvault:

     rm get-pip.py && pip install gmvault

  7. Create a folder to store the backups, otherwise they’ll go to $HOME/gmvault-db:

     mkdir /volume1/gmvault

  8. Run gmvault. Notice the --emails-only option since I don’t care about chats, and -d flag with my custom backup path:

    gmvault sync [email protected] --emails-only -d /volume1/gmvault/your_account\@gmail.com/

It will run for a while now. Repeat steps 7 and 8 if you have multiple accounts.

Automated backups with cron

Now, let’s set up a cron job to have daily backups.

  1. Open the crontab:

     vi /etc/crontab

  2. Edit the crontab. For daily/weekly backups you can use -t quick. Note that entries must be delimited by tabs. This will run daily at 2AM :

    0 2 * * * root  gmvault sync [email protected] --resume -t quick --emails-only -d /volume1/gmvault/your_account\@gmail.com/

  3. Save your crontab and restart the cron service:

    synoservice -restart crond

You’re all set!

Update (May, 25th 2018): A previous version of this article included a crontab that ran every minute for an hour, instead of once at a given hour. Thanks Kristian for the tip!