13 May, 2010

Backup your Gmail Inbox Online

gmail logoIf you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk. That’s easy!
Windows Live Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird are some nice email clients that can automatically and easily bring your entire archive of Gmail messages offline.
Why you should backup Gmail to the cloud?
If you are not a huge fan of desktop applications or if you think that setting up a Gmail backup plan involves way too much effort, you can consider creating a backup of your Gmail account in the cloud itself. Before we get into the details, here are three situations where an online backup of Gmail messages will come handy:
Reason #1 – If your main Gmail account gets hacked, you will still have access to all your previous emails.
Reason #2 – If you delete an important email from your Gmail Inbox by mistake, you can easily retrieve it from the online backup. Google Apps Premier has Postini to restore deleted emails, here you’re getting that facility for free.
Reason #3 – If the Gmail service goes down (yes, it happens), you will still be able to read your older emails. Gmail outage won’t affect work.

Backup your Gmail Messages Online

There are three services that can help you automatically backup your Gmail (and Google Apps) email accounts online and luckily, they won’t cost you anything.
gmail mail fetcher
The first and most obvious choice is Gmail. Create a new Gmail account and under Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Check mail using POP3 –> Add POP3 email account, enter the email address of your main Gmail account that you want to backup.
Within an hour or so, the online mail fetcher program will pull messages from your main Gmail account and will copy them to your new “backup” account. In my limited testing, I found that Gmail’s mail fetcher left all the messages that were either “read” or have been previously downloaded by another POP3 client so it’s not “true backup.”
That brings us to another alternative – copy your Gmail mailbox to Windows Live Hotmail. While you can add a Gmail account to Hotmail using POP3 (just like Gmail’s mail fetcher), there’s a much better and reliable option out there for copying emails from Gmail into Hotmail and it’s called TrueSwitch.
Copy Gmail
 Messages to Hotmail
Setup a new Hotmail account and TrueSwitch, an awesome web-based email account migration service, will copy all your emails and attachments from Gmail to your new Hotmail address. If you have a relatively large Gmail Inbox, the backup process might take up to 24 hours but you’ll get an email as soon as the transfer is complete.
Like Gmail, Hotmail too offers “expanding” storage so it can possibly fit your large Google inbox as well. You can then add your Gmail address to Hotmail (click “Add an email account” in the sidebar) and this will ensure that new messages that land in your Gmail inbox in the future are also saved in Hotmail.
That said, both the services discussed above have one common drawback – they’ll always backup your entire Gmail mailbox and you cannot limit the backup process to a specific set of folders (or labels in Gmail). So if you have a fairly large mailbox and don’t want to backup each and every Gmail folder (or label), try Backupify.

Author: Amit Agarwal

07 May, 2010

Download Youtube Videos as MP3

 

download youtube videos as mp3Video2mp3

Services like Video2mp3 make downloading YouTube videos as MP3 files a simple 3 step process.  It simply allows you to enter the URL, click “convert”, and finally download the MP3 from the provided link.
Grab the YouTube URL:


Head over to video2mp3, enter the YouTube URL there and click “convert“:

download youtube videos as mp3

Wait a bit for the conversion and then just download the mp3 from the link.  Could this service get any simpler?  Yes, with a Firefox add-on that adds a link to YouTube video pages to directly convert the video.

 

Dirpy

Dirpy is not just yet another YouTube MP3 converter.  This site has quite a few features that set it apart.
First of all, they have integrated a bookmarklet into the mix making getting a video into the studio as easy as clicking a bookmarklet while on the YouTube video page.

download youtube videos as mp3

Other features include the ability to set the file name and the start and end time of the MP3.
Basically, take what VideotoMp3 does (an easy 3 step process) and add a few very cool features, and a fun-to-say name, and you have Dirpy.

 

Vid2MP3

This happens to be the site I stumbled upon when I was doing my presentation and it did the job in a good amount of time.  The site looks a bit weird but, like I said, it worked out great.
As it turns out, this site offers the choice between standard and high quality.  Using it is as easy as using Video2mp3 and only requires entering the URL:

download youtube videos as mp3
And downloading the MP3:

youtube mp3 converter
And then you’ll actually have to click another link to download it (why?):

youtube mp3 converter

Two cool features that VidToMP3 offers are the ability to preview the MP3 in an online player before downloading and the ability to email a friend a link to download the MP3.  You will have to excuse quite a few ads on this site but the results are good and timely.

Courtesy: Make Use
Author: Tim Lenahan