iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

Recently I had opportunity to obtain a Gmail account (thanks James). For those you living under a rock it's the latest fad as far as free e-mail is concerned from the same people who brought us Google. The biggest attraction of Gmail is the 1,000 megabyte storage box and saner(?) monetization model that will rely upon the same text ads you may have seen near Google's search results, rather then big bulky banners and/or popup variations. At this time the system is in beta stage, so to get an account you first must be invited by an existing member, but only some members can invite (I am not one of them, so don't bother asking). While my initial plan for this account was to use it as the handler for mail comming to my @php.net account, which now a days comprises mostly of spam and windows viruses. Rather then have my server perform slow analysis on some 2-3 thousand messages, I'd let Google's Gmail do it for me.

Since most of the e-mail going to that account ended up being removed by spam filters, which seem to be quite good the account ended being rather empty, which seems rather wasteful.

So, I've come up with a quick utility to make use of at least a small portion of the available space for backup purposes. To accomplish this task I wrote a small PHP script that can be used to backup files to Gmail and then quickly retrieve them back if and when you need them. I trust that Gmail servers are fairly reliable, and this offers an excellent offsite backup that is extremely fast (I can max out my connection on download 300k/sec) and accessible from anywhere internet is available. Given that you do have 1gig of space quite a few things can be backed up .

If you want to try it for yourself here is the script itself:
Plain Text Highlighted PHP Source

P.S. The script can probably be optimized to run a little faster by removing regex and making cURL use Keep-Alive, but given that most of the time is spent retrieving the file that is not a big concern at the moment.