Backup Gmail

Further to the other guy's post, yes you can easily backup your Gmail emails by using an email client like Thunderbird to get them over POP. The client will store your emails on your hard drive. You can backup your Gmail contacts by going to contacts on their webmail and click the 'export' link on the top right. That will let you save them as a csv or some such.

Easy peasy. Whether Thunderbird will let you stop Google allowing China to censor its search results is another matter, but then the collective IQ involved in these Open Source projects is vast ...