February 27, 2011 was a Black Sunday for all Gmail users and lovers like me.  Some Gmail accounts lost everything: messages, address books, contacts, etc.  0.08% of all total users (according to Google’s official version) had problems.

I was lucky enough not to be among them, but the event was enough for me to lose the blind faith that I had in Gmail.  And so I began to start thinking about solutions to the problem of creating an incremental backup for Gmail that would be lightweight but effective.

That’s how I got started with analyzing the problem, starting with Gmail IMAP Extensions.  Their IMAP extensions have all the functions and properties needed to obtain a backup that can guarantee complete restoration of all data (folders, threads, etc).  I wanted a lightweight, silent, reliable app, something that worked in the background in classic Mac style, “like the Time Machine“.  Something simple to configure, without shell commands or cronjobs to set-up, and with the principle that once you’ve installed it, you can forget about it.

That’s how BackUp Gmail first took shape in my mind …