everyone who uses google services knows that google has copies of your data: your search history, gmail, youtube history and much more. But did you know that you can also download a copy of this data for yourself? yes, and it’s stupid easy.
related: how to stop receiving personalized ads from google
The product, called Google Takeout, has been around for a few years, but it’s surprising how many people still don’t know about it. It’s a comprehensive way to download all your Google data across all Google services. Here’s a full list of everything included in the takeaway:
- +1 on google+
- android pay
- blogger
- bookmarks
- calendars
- chrome data (autofill, bookmarks, etc.)
- contacts
- drive (all files)
- wrapping data
- photos
- play books
- google+ circles
- google+ pages
- google+ stream (all posts)
- groups
- hands-free
- hangouts
- live hangouts
- hold
- location history
- maps (your places)
- moderator
- my maps
- profile
- search
- tasks
- voice
- youtube (history, playlists, subs, videos)
so yeah…everything.
The nice thing here is that you can choose whatever you want, including sub-options within many of the categories. for example, you can choose specific calendars or chrome settings to download. it becomes quite granular.
If you like it, let’s dig deeper. To get started, you can directly access Google Takeout here. if you prefer to take the scenic route, you can also get there by going to your google account, choosing “manage your google activity”, scrolling down to the “control your content” section, and selecting “create archive”.
Now that we’re all on the same page (literally), here’s what you can expect from takeout.
The top option is where you can manage your files, but if this is your first time using takeout, there won’t be anything there. just keep it in mind for future reference – a collection of your file downloads will be displayed here. for this piece, however, we’re more interested in what’s below.
By default, all options are on, but there is a button at the top to “select none”. if you only plan to download a couple of things, this is the easiest way to go. if you want the whole shed, leave it as it is.
You’ll also notice that many of the options have a small dropdown arrow next to the on/off button. this is where you will select multiple options or get more information (if available) about each selection.
for example, the +1 option simply tells you that the data is provided in html format and nothing else. but blogger options allow you to choose specific blogs to download, assuming you have more than one.
So I definitely recommend going through each of these options, especially the ones you know you’re going to want in your download, and selecting anything that’s important to you. I really like how granular you can get with this setup.
The only thing I would highlight here is that there are a handful of different file types that your data will be downloaded into. hangouts data comes in json format, keep comes as html, calendar in ical, etc. the main exception here is unit data, which has several options for different document types:
again, pick and choose what works best for you. once you’ve reviewed all the options and configured everything, click the “next” box at the bottom.
This is where you’ll choose the file type, file size, and how you’d like to get the download. The default option is set to download the file as a zip file with a maximum size of 2GB. if you stick with zip, but want a larger size, it will automatically convert to zip64, which may not be compatible with older operating systems. if you choose to leave it at 2gb, the file will be split into as many 2gb files as needed.
if you’re looking to extract all your data and you know it’s going to be a huge file, you might want to go with the tgz or tbz options, both of which default to 50gb files. and pretty much any good archive program (like 7-zip) will be able to extract these files.
once you have decided, you will need to define your delivery method: get a download link by email or add the file to a specific cloud storage medium. drive, dropbox and onedrive are supported.
after that, just click the “create file” button.
a progress bar will show you how far along everything is, both in percentage and total data. Naturally, the time it takes to create your file will depend on how much data you’re actually collecting: the more files, the more time. if you’re downloading everything, it could take literally days to compile.
Once you’re done, you’ll receive an email letting you know. if you choose to get the download via email, there will be a link here. otherwise, you can also access the download by going back to your takeout page and selecting the “manage files” button at the top.
Finally, just click the download button next to the option you want to deploy. done and done.
note: the files are only available for download for one week, after which they will be deleted and you will need to recompile them.
After the file finishes downloading, go ahead and extract it. the root folder will have a handful of options, a folder for each service you’ve included in your file, along with a page called “index.html”. this is essentially the table of contents of your file.
Using this page, you can look at each file or set of files individually. simply click the option you’d like to see more information about and a brief description will appear at the bottom of the page, along with a link to open the file. also note that these links will only work if you actually extracted the files.
lastly, it will be indicated on both the download page and the index page if there are any errors. if that happens, you can always try to download the data for the specific service again individually by following the download steps and selecting only that particular service.
Whether you want to control everything google has stored, import some of your data to another service, or just want to get copies of everything before you wash your hands of a specific account, takeout is a fantastic service that should be a perfect fit for you. the invoice.