Yes. I have a combination of self hosted email and a vendor email provider. I access both with IMAPS. I pull down the emails with Thunderbird and never leave them on the server. I back up the local Thunderbird data folder locally then back it up to multiple encrypted SSD/NVME.
Why don't you leave your mail on your own server? I self-host (on the server-under-the-stairs here on the farm) as well and always leave mail on the server so I can access it from any client anywhere in the world. Assuming you're actually self-hosting as in 'running your own services on your own hardware at your own location' pulling it from the server doesn't make sense since you're just moving data from one of your drives to another. If you're 'self-hosting' on a VPS I can see why you'd do that but I don't consider this to be 'total' self-hosting since you're using hardware outside of your own control.
My preference. I don't really go anywhere so around the world is not required for me. It also means that when either my self hosted solution or the commercial solution gets popped there is nothing to leak. My emails are not exposed to the internet 99.99% of the time.
Run an IMAP server (on a separate host or VM) behind a locally hosted VPN - Wireguard is easy to set up and works fine for this - and you can have it both ways: mail accessible from all your clients no matter where you are. If your mail server is breached there won't be anything on it since everything is sucked up by the IMAP server. If your PC (where you currently store your mail) is compromised they'll be able to get access to everything so in that respect there is no change.
If I import the folder into Thunderbird, yes. The search in Thunderbird is a subjective topic but it works for me. There are probably other tools to search through them but I have never tried to find one.
I wonder if there’s an app that can enable this kind of backup, which when restored or searched can search through all those snapshots and just one and can tell me where that certain email is so that I can just restore only that snapshot.
https://notmuchmail.org/ is an excellent way to search through gigabytes of email extremely quickly. It’s faster than Gmail, Outlook or any other webmail provider.
Comments
Do you backup your Emails?
Yes. I have a combination of self hosted email and a vendor email provider. I access both with IMAPS. I pull down the emails with Thunderbird and never leave them on the server. I back up the local Thunderbird data folder locally then back it up to multiple encrypted SSD/NVME.
Why don't you leave your mail on your own server? I self-host (on the server-under-the-stairs here on the farm) as well and always leave mail on the server so I can access it from any client anywhere in the world. Assuming you're actually self-hosting as in 'running your own services on your own hardware at your own location' pulling it from the server doesn't make sense since you're just moving data from one of your drives to another. If you're 'self-hosting' on a VPS I can see why you'd do that but I don't consider this to be 'total' self-hosting since you're using hardware outside of your own control.
My preference. I don't really go anywhere so around the world is not required for me. It also means that when either my self hosted solution or the commercial solution gets popped there is nothing to leak. My emails are not exposed to the internet 99.99% of the time.
Run an IMAP server (on a separate host or VM) behind a locally hosted VPN - Wireguard is easy to set up and works fine for this - and you can have it both ways: mail accessible from all your clients no matter where you are. If your mail server is breached there won't be anything on it since everything is sucked up by the IMAP server. If your PC (where you currently store your mail) is compromised they'll be able to get access to everything so in that respect there is no change.
Can you search through old emails easily?
If I import the folder into Thunderbird, yes. The search in Thunderbird is a subjective topic but it works for me. There are probably other tools to search through them but I have never tried to find one.
I wonder if there’s an app that can enable this kind of backup, which when restored or searched can search through all those snapshots and just one and can tell me where that certain email is so that I can just restore only that snapshot.
https://notmuchmail.org/ is an excellent way to search through gigabytes of email extremely quickly. It’s faster than Gmail, Outlook or any other webmail provider.
I can probably 'rgrep' my Archives folder (I'm using the maildir format, each email a text file).