Different ways of using Gmail as your backup harddisk – Xmail

Gmail offers more than 2GB of storage space and the limit is increased by almost 3.5MB per day. I am currently using 82 MB (3%) of allotted 2794 MB. Yeah, 82MB is too low and I achieve the low usage by deleting all useless mails. Ever since I started this blog I have been keeping a backup of the site contents (I run 3 websites in total) in a pen drive. Then I thought why don’t I backup the files on Gmail since so much space is free!

Sending a mail to myself everyday became tedious soon. Hence I was looking for tools which could upload files easily instead of going through the Gmail interface. I found two services – Xmail hard drive (which is still in beta) and Gmail drive shell extension. In this post I will look at Xmail harddrive. I will explore Gmail drive shell extension in the next post.

Xmail hard drive offers an online interface to upload and maintain files in a Gmail account. But to be frank I am not confident in entering my Gmail Id and password on a third party account. So I suggest you to get an alternate gmail account if you plan to use Xmail hard drive. Also you never know when Gmail will block this! So use it only as a backup to your backup

Following screenshot shows?Ç the Xmail hard drive interface. Pretty simple, select your file and upload it. For images, it offers thumbnail functionality. As can be seen in the next screenshot, all your files will end up in your inbox and hence one more reason to use an alternate mail id.

Xmail screenshot

Gmail inbox after Xmail usage

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