If you have always wanted to keep a copy of your data locally, just in case, now you can. Google has started letting users download their data. What can you download? All of your mail and calendars, or a subset of labels and calendars, if that is what you need.

Here is how you can download Gmail and other Google products data: 

1. Click https://www.google.com/settings/takeout to go to Download your data from Google>Account.
2. Click the Create an archive button.
3. Select the Google products you want to back-up, by checking the box next to their names. You can also check Select all to download the data across all the Google products. Archives larger than 2GB will be split into multiple zip files.
4. The default file format is .zip. Select Change and select .tgz or .tbz from the Archive file format menu if you want to check the file format.
5. Click the Create Archive button.

If you do not see the option to download Gmail mails yet, check back again in a few days. Google is rolling out the ability to download Gmail messages over the next month.

[Image courtesy: Google]