4 ms·

I use Google Photos and once a year I do a Google takeout to a hard drive and put that drive somewhere safe. I tweeted about this a while back and several peop

I use Google Photos and once a year I do a Google takeout to a hard drive and put that drive somewhere safe. I tweeted about this a while back and several people had good replies: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1445408384472211464 https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1445408384472211464 For context, this was after facebook was down for a day. I think the odds of Google deleting all my photos is pretty low, but the odds of me losing access to my Google account for legitimate or non-legitimate reasons is much higher.

fredley 5y ago
I do this and I put the takeout zips into AWS as well. The odds of losing access to both at the same time are sufficiently low.
kevincox 5y ago
The problem I had is that the takeouts always failed with "some data could not be exported, please retry" no matter how many times I retried.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  If you're in the EU, you can start annoying them with “this is my legal right, pls fix”-type complaints. If you're polite, persistent, and keep escalating, you might even get all your data.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Exact same problem here. Takeouts just does not work for me.
clawoo 5y ago
Since we're talking about takeout, it's always a good idea to export your Gmail inbox once a year, encrypt it with GPG (or something similar) and store it offline somewhere on a drive.
- SteveNuts 5y ago
  There's also a fantastic tool by Jay Lee that will do it in an automated fashion https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
- davchana 5y ago
  I use a google script with time trigger and filters to download each message (30 days or more older, so that I have time to delete unwanted), as .eml files too, along with your suggested mox files.
shepherdjerred 5y ago
Are there any tools to automate this process? I know you can schedule Google Takeout, but I want the backups to be automatically downloaded and saved somewhere, e.g. S3 or my local NAS

fredley 5y ago

I do this and I put the takeout zips into AWS as well. The odds of losing access to both at the same time are sufficiently low.

kevincox 5y ago

The problem I had is that the takeouts always failed with "some data could not be exported, please retry" no matter how many times I retried.

wizzwizz4 5y ago
If you're in the EU, you can start annoying them with “this is my legal right, pls fix”-type complaints. If you're polite, persistent, and keep escalating, you might even get all your data.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Exact same problem here. Takeouts just does not work for me.

clawoo 5y ago

Since we're talking about takeout, it's always a good idea to export your Gmail inbox once a year, encrypt it with GPG (or something similar) and store it offline somewhere on a drive.

SteveNuts 5y ago
There's also a fantastic tool by Jay Lee that will do it in an automated fashion https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
davchana 5y ago
I use a google script with time trigger and filters to download each message (30 days or more older, so that I have time to delete unwanted), as .eml files too, along with your suggested mox files.

shepherdjerred 5y ago

Are there any tools to automate this process? I know you can schedule Google Takeout, but I want the backups to be automatically downloaded and saved somewhere, e.g. S3 or my local NAS