After reading about the recent news of gmail bug that caused a lot of users to lose all their emails (temporarily) I decided to have a backup of all my emails in gmail account.
I did some research on the options available to backup all existing emails and to automatically backup all future emails. After going through a couple of options I decided to create a hotmail account and then move all emails from gmail to the new hotmail account.
TrueSwitch is a good email migration tool which can copy all the emails, contacts and calendar from one email account to or windows live hotmail. You need to provide the user name and password for old email account and new email account for it to copy emails between the two accounts.
After providing ‘From’ email account (gmail) and ‘To’ email account (newly created hotmail account) details and clicking on ‘Copy to Windows Live Hotmail’, I logged on to my hotmail account and I could already see few emails from my gmail account there! Each gmail label was created as a folder in hotmail. One thing that I noticed is that all emails that had more than one label in gmail were copied under one folder in hotmail. For ex. an email that had 3 labels in gmail, say, label1, label2 and label3 was copied under the folder label1 in hotmail (assuming that all three lables are already created as three different folders in hotmail, I guess it randomly copies the email to one of the folders). I kept on refreshing hotmail and I could see more and more emails being copied every time.
However after sometime it stopped copying emails. I could see only around 25% of the emails in hotmail that were being copied from gmail account. I have around 2000 emails in my gmail account. I waited till the next day and checked again but there was no progress. I was not sure if I should try copying all over again because it could result in copying the same emails again and I may end up having duplicate emails. Finally I decided to give it a try and used TrueSwitch again to copy emails from gmail to hotmail. I also sent an email to the support team of TrueSwitch with the details of the problem. I received an automated response from them saying that they are looking into the issue.
When I checked my hotmail after 2 hrs, I saw an email from TrueSwitch indicating that the migration was complete. I could see all my emails from gmail in hotmail 
I’m not sure if support team did the trick or the second attempt to copy.
After this I enabled ‘autoforward’ feature in gmail to automatically forward all incoming emails to the new hotmail account. This way, I’ll have all my emails in both gmail and in hotmail.