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MacOS

Backing up your GMail account

Thursday, 17 March 2011 22:53 | Author: Andreas |

As a computer scientist I never keep backups of my emails because Google takes care of them :) Recently, I read news about mass-email losses at gmail so I thought it would be a good idea to spend some gigabytes of my backup drives for my valuable emails. The tool of my choice was getmail and luckily I found a lot of postings where users reported that they had successfully retrieved all their mails. Like always when you try something yourself, it doesn't work out. I got an error that the selected mailbox wasn't found on the server. After installing Thunderbird and accessing the GMail account (via IMAP) I found out, that in my case the mailbox name is [Gmail]/Alle Nachrichten instead of [Gmail]/All Mail. I tend do switch languages on webpages with logins so I was surprised because I had spanish as selected language. Maybe these directories are created only once? I'll never know but if you run into the same problem, try to access the GMail account via IMAP and note the directory name for "All Mail / Alle Nachrichten".

Code snippet that fails on my account:

[...]
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/All Mail",)
[...]

This is my actual config file (located in ~/.getmail/)

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS(at)gmail.com
password = YOUR_PASSWORD
mailboxes = ("[Gmail]/Alle Nachrichten",)
port = 993

[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = /Volumes/elements/backup/gmail/gmail-backup.mbox
#type = Maildir
#path = /Volumes/elements/backup/gmail/maildir/


[options]
verbose = 2
message_log = /Volumes/elements/backup/gmail/gmail.log
received = false
delivered_to = false
read_all = false

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Last Updated (Thursday, 17 March 2011 23:25)

Upgrading Leopard to Snow Leopard on a computer with dual boot

Friday, 23 October 2009 15:24 | Author: Andreas |

I own a MacBook Pro and lately I wanted to upgrade my MacOS Leopard to Snow Leopard. My MacBook Pro had three partition:

Leopard
Linux
Linux Swap

Unfortunately Snow Leopard complained during installation that it couldn't find a partition to install the OS. Therefore I thought this might be connected with my partitions of the hard disk. After a complete backup of all my files on the Linux partition I deleted both Linux partitions and resized the hard disk with GParted so that there was only a single partition. Then I restored my data by using Time Machine. First Time Machine couldn't find the partition because I had chosen another name than the one used during backup with Time Machine. I changed the name back to the previous one and Time Machine restored my data without any problems.

Now Snow Leopard could be installed but after rebooting I ran into a new problem. I pressed Apple-V during boot up and my computer got frozen after this line:

AppleIntelCPUPowermanagement: Initialization complete Screenshot

I couldn't find a solution in the web so I just tried to reinstall Snow Leopard. After the second installation the problem was gone and since then I haven't had troubles anymore.

Maybe I had a pending update in the installation queue and therefore my system was messed up? We will never know ... ;-)

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Last Updated (Friday, 23 October 2009 16:21)