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Well well well, for me Google Takeout experience has been pretty bad so far. A couple of years ago I exported all my photos with Takeout, because I wanted to h

Well well well, for me Google Takeout experience has been pretty bad so far. A couple of years ago I exported all my photos with Takeout, because I wanted to have them locally in my LAN and back them up in BackBlaze. At the same type I set up SyncThing from my phone to my local disk to store and backup new photos and videos without going through Google Photos. But I did leave the "backup" to GPhotos option turned on. Fast forward this year, my (legacy) Google account on which I had most of the photos/videos is now running out of space, so I first reduced the quality of uploaded photos/videos, then completely disabled the backup (I have another cloud backup anyway with Amazon Photos). And then I wanted to stop Google nag and annoy me 3 times a week with the "you almost have no more space in your account, buy Google One ASAP" thing. First thing, I deleted some old shit/videos/attachments I had in GMail from late '00s when Dropbox wasn't a thing yet, but beside some video you quickly realize that photos back in the day were muuuuch smaller. Then I said, OK, I'm going to set a cutoff date for GPhotos and manually delete by UI all photos before 2013. I selected all of them, and put the in the "recycle bin". Then my inner sysadmin instincts came in and said: "hey, did you check that you have on disk and Backblaze those photos?". And behold! they WERE NOT THERE! I had the Takeout output saved as a whole (it actually comes as a zipped or targz file back in the day) and sure enough it somehow stopped around 2013. So, I went swiftly to restore the photos/videos from the bin and back to their place, and then triggered a new Google Takeout. A few hours after, I got an email saying that... IT FAILED, and that I need to retry it. Ok... so maybe it's because I just restored the photos from the recycle bin, let's wait a few more days just to be sure. After a week or so I tried again and a few hours after, again a failure email. This was like 2 months ago, I will try again now since I wrote already this wall of text, but, is there anybody that experienced the same? Did you find a way to get your Takeout?

pierat 3y ago
> Fast forward this year, my (legacy) Google account on which I had most of the photos/videos is now running out of space, so I first reduced the quality of uploaded photos/videos, then completely disabled the backup (I have another cloud backup anyway with Amazon Photos). And then I wanted to stop Google nag and annoy me 3 times a week with the "you almost have no more space in your account, buy Google One ASAP" thing. You know, when Google came out with Gmail, their top comment was that 'You'd never run out of storage, ever'. That was their advertising reel. And then, on Android, 'back up everything user-content' is turned on. And these days it's to grab as much data as possible, AND to then nag you to death with "your storage is running out". I've got all my emails locally. I'm downloading my images, and what few files in Google docs are already copied. Google is just a corpse being bandied around by advertisers and marketers to be made-believe as real.
cameronh90 3y ago
I also have the issue that Google Takeout just flat out fails every time I try it. I tried getting support for it via my paid Google One subscription but I just got bounced around different teams and nobody knew what to do. Ultimately they just said it can’t be fixed. For me, it was the last straw. I bought an iPhone and I’m degoogling now. I guess to get my data out I might need to submit an GDPR data portability request, if I can find where to submit it.
- ArnoVW 3y ago
  The Data Protection Officer is a formally defined role within the GDPR. Search for that term + company, and you should find an address. Generally dpo@company.com, or similar. The Data Accessibility modalities need to be defined in the Data Processing Agreement. So "dpa" or "data processing agreement" are also good search terms.
- danielhep 3y ago
  FWIW Apple Photos is even worse. There is no mass export mechanism for Apple Photos, and it won't let you sync an album on MacOS to an external drive. I had to make a MacOS VM on my server and attach a large internal drive. Then, after syncing my 900 GB of media, I connected the drive to a Linux VM and extracted the media from the Photos library.
darkwater 3y ago
Update on this: this time the Takeout worked, even if I had to use Chromium to download because on Firefox I was getting a strange HTTP 400 after clicking the button. I still have many older albums with a lot of IMG_NNNN.JPG.json with all the metadata but NOT the actual picture. Weird. I'm pretty sure those are not albums with other contributors.

pierat 3y ago

> Fast forward this year, my (legacy) Google account on which I had most of the photos/videos is now running out of space, so I first reduced the quality of uploaded photos/videos, then completely disabled the backup (I have another cloud backup anyway with Amazon Photos). And then I wanted to stop Google nag and annoy me 3 times a week with the "you almost have no more space in your account, buy Google One ASAP" thing. You know, when Google came out with Gmail, their top comment was that 'You'd never run out of storage, ever'. That was their advertising reel. And then, on Android, 'back up everything user-content' is turned on. And these days it's to grab as much data as possible, AND to then nag you to death with "your storage is running out". I've got all my emails locally. I'm downloading my images, and what few files in Google docs are already copied. Google is just a corpse being bandied around by advertisers and marketers to be made-believe as real.

cameronh90 3y ago

I also have the issue that Google Takeout just flat out fails every time I try it. I tried getting support for it via my paid Google One subscription but I just got bounced around different teams and nobody knew what to do. Ultimately they just said it can’t be fixed. For me, it was the last straw. I bought an iPhone and I’m degoogling now. I guess to get my data out I might need to submit an GDPR data portability request, if I can find where to submit it.

ArnoVW 3y ago
The Data Protection Officer is a formally defined role within the GDPR. Search for that term + company, and you should find an address. Generally dpo@company.com, or similar. The Data Accessibility modalities need to be defined in the Data Processing Agreement. So "dpa" or "data processing agreement" are also good search terms.
danielhep 3y ago
FWIW Apple Photos is even worse. There is no mass export mechanism for Apple Photos, and it won't let you sync an album on MacOS to an external drive. I had to make a MacOS VM on my server and attach a large internal drive. Then, after syncing my 900 GB of media, I connected the drive to a Linux VM and extracted the media from the Photos library.

darkwater 3y ago

Update on this: this time the Takeout worked, even if I had to use Chromium to download because on Firefox I was getting a strange HTTP 400 after clicking the button. I still have many older albums with a lot of IMG_NNNN.JPG.json with all the metadata but NOT the actual picture. Weird. I'm pretty sure those are not albums with other contributors.