Comment by chongli
18 hours ago
Friendly reminder that Google Takeout [1] exists. When I read a story a few years ago about a guy who had his primary Google account banned with no recourse (for reselling Pixel phones) and permanently lost 20 years worth of emails and family photos, I researched and found Takeout and used it to back up all my data, then subsequently stopped using Google services altogether (apart from YouTube).
Unfortunately the service is very buggy in my experience. When I tried to download all of my photos data multiple times it gave me corrupted .zip files and half of the files were just zero bytes. Maybe I can blame Firefox for that though, I dunno. I should probably try again with Chrome before completely blaming Google
I've never had a problem with Google Takeout the multiple times I've used it. Perhaps try making the compressed files smaller (You can choose to make them 1gb or greater, last time I used it), you might need to download 75 files, but it's better than 1 big file.
That doesn't solve all issues, such as services you have signed up to using your Gmail account.
Services generally allow changing your email address. Otherwise, it’s one more reason to use your own email domain.
It's called lock in for a reason.
It's supposed to be hard to leave.
I'm just grateful they at least have takeout.
Thank you for this. I had no idea this existed.