Questions about data sovereignty, data security and cloud computing may seem most appropriate for corporations and governments, but the issues are important for every person who has an email account. Technichor’s Horcrux Email Backup (http://thehorcrux.com/) is a new Mac app that lets email users automatically keep their data rather than surrendering it to third party services.
Most people who use email use one of the major third-party providers like Gmail, Hotmail, or Apple. The data which is stored with these providers actually belongs to the provider, not to the user. As a result, many people have been surprised to discover that they can lose access to their data without any recourse.
Horcrux is a background app that takes daily snapshots of email account state similar to Apple’s Time Machine. The app allows users to browse the emails and undelete specific emails. Another feature of Horcrux is the option it gives people to change email providers without losing all prior data. Horcrux will migrate all the emails to another email service, retaining all tags and hierarchies.
Horcrux Email Backup requires Mac OS X 10.7 or higher. It costs US$14.99 and is available at the Mac App Store in the Utilities category.