How-To

How to backup your Gmail attachments using Google Drive

Want to make sure your email files are secure? Use Google Drive to back them up.

by
Krima Desai
January 2, 2022

Image: KnowTechie

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As the world has transitioned from physical documents to digital ones, we have also started receiving them by email.

Having all of your documents grouped in your inbox can be useful, but it also means that if you accidentally delete the attachments there may not be any way to recover them.

Luckily, Gmail users can solve this issue by backing up their email attachments to their Google Drive account. There, you can organize them in folders, just like you would if you were to download them all to your computer.

How to back up Gmail attachments to Google Drive

Google Drive can be used to store any type of file, regardless of its format. However, you will have to constantly keep an eye on your storage capacity. Depending on your type of account, you may have anywhere from 15 GB to 2 TB to store your files.

The process of storing attachments in your Google Drive is extremely simple. Here’s how to do it:

Open Gmail and log into your account

Find the email that contains the attachments that you want to back up and place the mouse cursor over the attached file

Once the command shortcuts appear, press the Add to Drive button that has the Google Drive symbol. This will send the attachment to your Drive

After you’ve saved the file to your Google Drive, you can click on the Organize Drive shortcut in the same location to choose the folder that you want to send it to

If an email has multiple files, you can save all of them by clicking on the Add all to Drive shortcut that’s to the right of the attachments section. You can then use step 4 to organize the files into folders

There you have it! A quick guide to backing up attachments using Google Drive.

Keep Your Files Safe Using Google Drive

Google Drive offers 15 GB of storage as part of its free subscription, which is more than enough to store hundreds of email attachments. Use the available space to create a personal archive that you can access from any device and at any time. The files will still be there even if you completely delete all of your emails.

Furthermore, don’t forget that you can open Office files right from your browser, so you’ll never have to download the file in order to view its contents.

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