Comment by dannyphantom
3 years ago
I’ve (slowly) begun to make an archive of all my Google data so it will be less-awful should something ever happen. Your story scares the crap out of me because I (already) have an account that I’ll never be able to access again either - c’est la vie but it still stinks to know that a large part of my life is locked behind a metaphorical prison.
You know about Takeout, right?
If it is just email, it is more ergonomic to setup a local POP client like Thunderbird to download the emails. You don't have to use it to send email, just configure once and bring it up regularly to fetch the emails. I have a full copy of my gmail mailbox this way (already moved banking/govt services to fastmail anyway).
Yeah, this is what I do for email as well. Lets you seamlessly transition your backup to another service if/when you stop using gmail too. Though I use imap rather than pop, so that I don't end up with duplicates or other weirdness. (I keep incremental backups of the drive where the email is stored, so I'm not worried about a situation where both the cloud and backup copies get wiped.)
1 reply →
Have you ever tried to takeout a large amount of data across many services? Describing it as a process you do slowly is entirely fair.
For me, I just used google takeout to generate a giant 18gig zip and then I downloaded it. I do that once a year. It takes a long time to download, but it’s actually fairly quick and I wouldn’t describe it as a slow process.
7 replies →
Why does it matter if it's slow or fast? Because it's easy, regardless.
You just click the boxes for the services you want, it e-mails you when it's ready minutes/hours later, and you download the file(s) at the speed of your internet connection.
Considering it has to zip up many gigabytes of data from various sources, it works at an entirely reasonable speed.
The idea that it's too slow to be of value is a reason not to use it makes no sense.
Do you just not make backups of your data at all, because backups take hours?
You can auth it to your Dropbox account if you have one and they will export to it on a cadence into the /Apps folder.