undyingking | Using Gmail as an offsite backup

Just in case this is of interest to anyone, I've been looking into the practicalities of using a Gmail account as a backup device. I was thinking it could be quite useful to be able to store copies of key stuff on Google's servers, 2GB is plenty of space to hold all I need to keep, and it ought to be straightforward and painless to keep the backup up-to-date via ADSL line.

Obviously you don't want to be emailing yourself myriads of files on a daily basis, that wouldn't be very practical. A usable solution is going to be one that treats the Gmail account as a filesystem, ie. you can just drag and drop the files you want to backup onto it. I've been told that this is contrary to Google's terms of use (although I can't find the relevant clause if so), but I've not heard of them actually objecting.

I've been looking at two different pieces of software that do this, RoamDrive and Gmail Drive. Both are free.

Gmail Drive is very smoothly integrated with Windows Explorer -- after you install it, it just appears as an extra drive under your 'My Computer'. You can then just drag and drop files to it exactly as you would to any other drive. It won't let you upload files larger than 10 MB (which is a Gmail limitation), or with filenames longer than 40 characters, or of certain extensions (.exe and .zip among them). If you're copying a load of files and it hits one that's illegal under these rules, the whole process stops: and there's no 'no to all' option when asked if you want to replace identical files, so incremental backups are a bit of a pain. There are versions for Mac and Linux, but I haven't looked at them.

RoamDrive is not integrated into Explorer, but has its own window into which you can drag and drop stuff. It has no file size limit, and no restrictions on filename length or extensions -- this is because basically it performs some sort of tarring and zipping operation on your whole requested transfer, and then breaks it up into chunks before uploading. This is very clever but does mean that when you want to see what files are on the backup, it takes ages to produce a list, presumably because it has to download a good deal of it to find out. It also fails extremely frequently during upload, and a partial upload is unusable -- you have to start the whole thing again. On the plus side it works with Hotmail accounts as well as Gmail ones. But on the minus, it carries adverts, including some nasty popunders.

To be honest I don't think I can wholly recommend either of these products, if like me you typically want to back up an entire project folder containing a mix of large and small files of different types. Gmail Drive's restrictions I find a bit too restrictive, and I have to use a third-party directory-comparison tool to manage incremental backups, which is a pain. RoamDrive would be good except that it fails far too often -- that's the main thing really, the rest I could live with. Probably though if you only want to back up a small number of files of smallish size, either owuld be fine. Well, they're both under development, so who knows, maybe the magic solution is out there somewhere. Or maybe Google will kill this whole practice at their end...