After reading the horror story of a hacked Gmail account I decided to get more benefit of my underused backup storage.

I currently have a desktop machine working as a server with Fedora Linux and an attached Drobo storage. Thus I set up the next configuration:

• a Gmail account
• OfflineIMAP for syncing to a local repository
• drobo redundant storage with 4 hardisks
• a maildir repository on the drobo
• a daily cron entry
  

The thing is syncing right now.  Evolution is supposed to be able to access the local repo which is very nice to check the repo althought I plan to use for one direction sync only. If interested, OfflineIMAP is supposed to do double direction syncs smothly.

Some caveats:

I'm having random OfflineIMAP crashes so I'm doing the first full sync calling it manually inside a while true bash line, but as far as I read seems to be a mature program with specific support for Gmail IMAP server.

If you wish secured access take care to set up the ssl variable to yes for each repository since setting port to 993 is not enough.

For next steps I'm considering to switch definitively to the Google 2-step verification and to set up a duplicated cloud backup using Amazon S3 or similar. I'm open for other suggestions :-)