I'm sure that many of my readers are like me, as in they completely rely on their Gmail account. But what would happen if you got a virus that deleted your emails, or someone hacks your account, or heaven forbid Google goes under, or at least their servers do. That's why you should always have a backup of everything. Yes, even things out in "the cloud" can go down. I've started using a freeware program called Gmail Backup. It simply downloads a copy of all the data on your Gmail account in a format that any email program can read. It can also send this data back up to Gmail, if you would need to restore it.

http://www.gmail-backup.com/

---Alex