How to back up your Gmail to a PST file

Why keep an offline Gmail archive?

• Leaving a job or school. Google Workspace accounts are usually suspended or deleted when you leave. Ask your administrator before exporting anything, follow your organization’s policy, and only take what you are allowed to keep, typically your personal correspondence rather than company data.
• Account closure or lockout. A lost phone, a forgotten recovery address or a policy suspension can lock you out, sometimes for good. A copy you already hold doesn’t depend on getting back in.
• Records and legal needs. Tax, business or personal paperwork often lives in email. If you are involved in a dispute or under a legal hold, follow your legal advisor’s instructions: a self-made archive is a convenience copy, not a forensic one.
• Storage limits. A free Google Account has 15 GB shared across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos. Archiving old mail offline lets you delete it from Gmail and free up space.
• Inactive accounts. Under Google’s inactive account policy, a personal Google Account that hasn’t been used for two years may be deleted, along with its mail. Google sends warnings first, but check Google’s policy page for the current rules, especially for old accounts you rarely sign in to.
• Peace of mind. Photos of your children, letters from people who have died, the receipt for a warranty claim: some messages are worth more than the effort of a yearly backup.

Why PST, and when MBOX is enough

Google Takeout gives you Gmail as an MBOX file. You can keep that as your backup, and you should keep it anyway. But MBOX is awkward to browse: Windows has nothing built in to open it, and your Gmail labels are only stored as a header inside each message.

A PST is Outlook’s own data file. Converted with your labels as folders, it opens in Outlook looking much like your Gmail did, with full search, attachments and read status.

If you rarely expect to look inside the archive, or you use Thunderbird or Apple Mail, the MBOX alone is fine. Our comparison MBOX vs PST explains the trade-offs in more detail.

Step 1: Export your mail with Google Takeout

1. Go to takeout.google.com, signed in to the account you want to back up.
2. Click Deselect all, then tick Mail. Leaving every Google product selected makes the export huge and slow.
3. To archive only part of your mail, click All Mail data included, untick Include all messages in Mail and choose labels, for example one label you want to clear out of Gmail.
4. Click Next step. Choose a download link by email, .zip (or .tgz for very large exports) and the largest file size, then click Create export.
5. When Google’s email arrives, download every part, extract them and find the .mbox file in Takeout/Mail.

Takeout always includes Spam and Trash in a full export. If you don’t want them in your archive, empty both in Gmail before you request it, or select specific labels instead.

Work and school accounts need Takeout enabled by the administrator. The full walkthrough, with screenshots of each choice, is in our Gmail Takeout guide.

Step 2: Convert the MBOX to a PST

Takeout puts all your mail into one MBOX file, with each message’s labels recorded inside it. A good conversion turns those labels back into folders without creating a copy of the message for every label.

With MoveMyInbox, that works like this:

1. Create an account, start a new conversion and drag in the MBOX file.
2. Under folders, choose Use Gmail labels. Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Spam and Trash become their Outlook equivalents, your own labels become folders (nested labels as subfolders), and archived mail without a label goes to Archive. Each message is stored once.
3. Check the one-time price for the file’s size (see pricing), pay and wait a few minutes while it converts.
4. Download the PST. Unread and starred messages keep their unread and flagged status.

One conversion can be up to 50 GB. For bigger accounts, export a few labels at a time in Takeout and convert each export separately; several smaller PST files are also quicker to open and copy. Our article on PST size limits explains why splitting helps. Uploads are deleted when the PST is ready and the PST after 7 days, as described on the security page.

Prefer a free route? Our comparison of ways to convert MBOX to PST covers the do-it-yourself options honestly.

Step 3: Store the archive safely

A backup on a single drive is one dropped laptop away from gone. The widely used 3-2-1 rule is a good target: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy kept offsite.

• Encrypt it. Your inbox is full of passwords, bank details and private conversations. Use BitLocker (Windows), FileVault or an encrypted disk image (Mac), a hardware-encrypted external drive, or an encrypted .7z or .zip archive with a strong password you won’t lose.
• Label it with the date, for example gmail-archive-2026-11.pst, so you know what each file covers.
• Keep the original MBOX too. It is the untouched export and readable by many apps.
• Don’t work from a synced folder. Copying a PST to cloud storage is fine, but don’t open it in Outlook from inside a OneDrive, Dropbox or iCloud folder: syncing while Outlook has it open can corrupt it.
• Test the restore. Open each copy at least once to prove it works.

Step 4: Open and search the archive in Outlook

You don’t need to import an archive to use it. In classic Outlook for Windows, choose File → Open & Export → Open Outlook Data File and select the PST (copied to a local folder first). It appears as a separate set of folders at the bottom of the folder pane, and nothing is uploaded to your mailbox.

Searching

Click a folder in the PST and type in the search box. Outlook lets you change the search scope: use Current folder (or subfolders) to stay inside the archive, or All Outlook items to search the archive and your mailbox together. The first search can be slow while Windows indexes the file.

Restoring into a mailbox

To put the mail back into an account, use the Import/Export wizard (File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Import from another program or file) or drag folders from the opened PST into your mailbox. Importing into a Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com mailbox counts against its storage quota.

Mac and the new Outlook

Outlook for Mac can import a PST (look for File → Import); the mail appears under On My Computer. PST support in the new Outlook for Windows is limited and still rolling out, so classic Outlook is the reliable way to open an archive. Our PST import guide has the details for each version.

Freeing up Gmail storage after archiving

Once you have a verified archive in at least two places, you can delete old mail from Gmail with more confidence. Search for something like older_than:5y or larger:10M, check the results, select them and delete.

Deleted messages sit in Trash for 30 days before Gmail removes them, and only then is the space freed. You can empty Trash yourself to speed this up. Check your usage at one.google.com/storage.

Keep it current: a simple refresh routine

A backup is only as recent as its last update. A routine that takes an hour or two once a year works well:

1. Pick a fixed date, such as early January, and put it in your calendar.
2. Request a new Takeout export of Mail and convert it to a dated PST.
3. Copy it to your external drive and your offsite location, then test that it opens.
4. Keep at least the previous year’s archive until the new one is verified.

Before a known event, such as leaving a job, closing an account or a big clean-out, make an extra backup rather than waiting for the yearly one.

Frequently asked questions