Discover Google Takeout , a Google service that allows you to retrieve and download your data stored by numerous Google services.
What is Google Takeout
Google Takeout is, in a nutshell, a Google service that allows you to access many of your data stored by Google and, if you wish, download it to your computer or any other device of your choice, simply to keep it or even to use it. in other programs.
In the first version of Google Takeout, released in 2011, you could access a few data, such as your photos in Picasa or your data on Buzz (service later closed).
Over time, Google Takeout has expanded.
The data you now have access to via Google Takeout relates to 24 Google products , and includes your photos (in Google Photos), your emails (in Gmail), your maps, your calendars (in Google Calendar), your contacts, everything you have in Google Drive and many other data .
What is Google Takeout for
In addition to using Google Takeout to monitor your data in Google, you can also use this service to recover any lost data , and to regularly download updated archives of your Google data.
This allows you to keep your data on your computer if you are concerned that Google may shut down some services and you don’t want to lose your data.
Furthermore, since your data can be downloaded in standard formats in the industry, and are therefore also readable by services external to Google, you can also export the downloaded data to other services , from Google or even third parties.
For example, you can export your Google Plus data from one of your accounts to another of your accounts.
Or, you can export your contacts from Google to your mobile phone app that manages contacts or to an email client.
One last example: via Google Takeout you can export all your emails in Gmail to other email programs such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail etc.
How to use Google Takeout
Google Takeout is easily accessible directly from the official Google Takeout page .
Alternatively, you can access it from your Google account page by clicking on ” Personal Information and Privacy “:
At this point, scroll down the page to the section the page to the section ” Check your content ” and then click on ” Create Archive “:
Now the Google Takeout interface opens :
To manage your archives, you can click on ” Manage archives ” (box 1 in the image):
However, if it is the first time you access the service, and you intend to save a copy of your data, you should first select the products whose data you want to store on your computer.
To choose which products to include or not in the archive, select or deselect the box relating to the product (box 2 in the image).
When you click on the product icons, Google Takeout gives you some additional guidance on the data content of that specific product:
In the “ Select the date to include ” section there is also the “ Deselect all ” button (box 3). When you click on “ Deselect All “, all products will be deselected.
Selecting only the products you are interested in allows you to create customized and smaller archives.
Some of these boxes in the list have the option to be clicked and thus make a further choice. For example, Blogger has two choices, to select a blog or to include all blogs.
For each box, Google Takeout tells you which extension each product uses to store data (box 4). For example, contacts are stored in vCard format.
At this point click on “Next” at the bottom of the page to continue creating the archive :
The next screen will tell you how many products you have selected and allows you to customize the download format by choosing between .zip, .tgz or .tbz format .
A caption in this phase reminds you that zip files can be used on all devices, so I advise you to leave the default settings (in fact, .zip).
At this point, choose whether to receive the notification message (when the archive is ready for download) via email, or whether to let Google import the archive of your data directly into Google Drive.
Confirm by clicking on Create archive :
On the next screen, Google Takeout will inform you that the times for creating the archive may be long (even a week). The fewer products you have selected, the less time it will take to create the archive.
If you have chosen email as a notification channel, when the notification arrives you will have to open Google Takeout (the email will contain the link to the service), click on “ Manage archives ” and download the archive.
Just unzip the archive to access your data (although depending on the data format you may need specific programs to view them).
As already mentioned, the data of the different products will be archived in standard formats: for example, the emails are archived in MBOX, which allows you to export the emails to other email programs, as well as the contacts are exported in vCard, another format standard usable by almost all major contact management services and all major e-mail clients.
If you have further questions on how to manage archives, I refer you to Google’s comprehensive guide on downloading data via Google Takeout .
In this lesson, you learned how to use Google Takeout to store a lot of your data held by Google. But Google Takeout isn’t the only Google product that stores your data. Some data are in fact accessible through other Google services.
In the next lesson (forthcoming) I will introduce you to all the other Google services that store your data and which you can access to see and possibly download your data.
For example, you can only access and download your music through Google Play and not through Google Takeout. Or, Google History shows your Google search history etc.
