A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago

Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: about 2 years ago

RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: about 2 years ago

If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: over 2 years ago

Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: over 2 years ago

You see this https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ ? It's only for mails but it's a great solution. Source: 7 months ago

Do your parents have a domain, or are they just using the provider's domain? I've set up my 1522+ to backup our mail accounts using MailPlus on the Synology, and IMAPSYC running on my lab server. But it's backup only, not archiving. That technology could be used to get to your desired state, but there's some work involved to make a secure connection from the internet to your Synology possible, sync/archive... Source: 7 months ago

Check out imapsync (https://imapsync.lamiral.info/) - I am using it since years and migrated tousands of mailboxes without any problems. Source: about 1 year ago

I would use https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ for email and sure there is another tool for contacts and calenders. Source: about 1 year ago

There are two solutions for this 1. Using a tool called imap-sync to sync all your emails (it has a great incremental sync). You can run it periodically via cron 2. Using the same or similar tool and export to a database. Source: about 1 year ago