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Google turns on "Download Gmail Archive" feature
- notastartup 13y agoanyone else getting just a zip of error.html which contains whole bunch of "Service failed to retrieve this item." for all emails?
- pseingatl 13y agoOr worse: system "got" 7 gigs, still in progress, refresh page, 7 gigs disappear.
- notastartup 13y agonow I'm getting this Sorry you have have reached the maximum number of archive creations allowed per day. You can try again tomorrow.
- rzendacott 13y agoI'm very impressed with the number of products and services supported so far. It has everything from bookmarks to location history. It even lets you choose the format for some products, and Drive in particular has some nice options. I'm glad to see Google opening this tool up.
- jonursenbach 13y agoThem allowing you to download your data isn't anything new. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front
- chmars 13y agoFor Gmail, it is new. Until recently, 'download' was only possible through IMAP and POP3 – and could therefore take days or even weeks due to throttling.
- davidgerard 13y agoAnd Google's shitty, shitty, broken IMAP implementation. Most of the dev work on offlineimap is to cope with GMail's weird ideas on what constitutes functional IMAP. https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap
- blueskin_ 13y agoAh, don't remind me. In an old job, they used gmail for email, so most of the company used Thunderbird. This worked fine for most of them, but sysadmins got so much email (mostly alerts) that google's crappy IMAP implementation kept breaking so the clients would be constantly syncing, and folder operations such as moving stuff would often take multiple minutes. My cheap VPS I run my own email on vastly outperforms gmail's IMAP.
- f_salmon 13y agoPlot twist: For NSA too.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoIt's still an improvement; before, the NSA could, and we couldn't.
- blowski 13y agoSeriously, please keep the NSA comments to NSA articles. I know the NSA issue is important, but yammering on about it in every article is the same as a Bible-bashing Christian raising the topic of Jesus in every single conversation. And I am Christian, and I do think the NSA issue is important.
- psbp 13y agoI had a moment of paranoia a few months back where I thought it was concerted attempt to trivialize the issue, but then I realized it's just a way to get cheap laughs/upvotes.
- blueskin_ 13y agoOr it's a way to keep it on people's minds - that isn't mutually exclusive with having a few laughs, I guess I can see that more easily than others coming from a nation with a long history of self-deprecating and dark humour, but it's by no means a unique phenomenon.
- thomasahle 13y agoAgreed. Say what you want about Google, but I can't think of many, although they might be hotter, start ups that provide an equivalent service.
- antifuchs 13y agoEasy prediction: they'll disable imap access within a year.
- themodelplumber 13y agoWhy would they do that? It seems like disabling IMAP would drive away huge numbers of users and give their competition more advantage.
- LoganCale 13y agoI'd certainly leave immediately.
- meese_ 13y agoWhy haven't you already?
- LoganCale 13y agoBecause it's a hassle and it's easier to keep using it so far, and the alternatives aren't as nice in other ways. It's going to be a bigger pain to do it once I'm forced to, but…
- nandhp 13y agoI haven't left because: (1) I don't have a server where I can run my own mail infrastructure -- I don't think my ISP would be happy with me running a mail server off my cable modem). And (2) I don't trust Outlook.com not to silently discard mail from randomly selected senders (as I believe Hotmail was known to do). Gmail is reliable. But otherwise, I'm ready. I've already stopped using the Gmail web interface (retaliation for killing Google Reader). And once I'm no longer tied to Gmail anymore, I can switch to a better IMAP client than Thunderbird.
- alextingle 13y agoIn all fairness, every mail server discards mail from some senders. Your junk folder would explode if everything got through.
- brohoolio 13y agoAm I missing something new? Hasn't this been in place for couple months?
- sixseven 13y agoWhen it was first announced, it was available to everyone (I didn't have it). I think now it's open to everyone.
- thejerz 13y agoWhen they announced it, it did not support Gmail. (Or many of the other Google services)
- thrownaway2424 13y agoTakeout was announced in 2011. Takeout for Gmail was announced in December 2013. Gmail has always supported POP and IMAP which are functionally equivalent to or superior to the MBOX archive format provided by Takeout, for most purposes.
- gtirloni 13y agoYes, in fact, as IMAP/POP3 access where you could download everything to your computer. I don't see why all the excitement.
- Ecio78 13y agoI had to migrate around 100 accounts out of Gmail (free) in 2009 and it was a pain because their IMAP implementation was sub-par and so all the IMAP migration tools (imapcopy etc..) failed/halted somewhere during the process on each mailbox. At the end we had to configure accounts on various computers and manually download them (probably two bad IMAP implementation, Gmail and Outlook, worked better together than using other tools :)) Of course POP was not acceptable because of lack of labels/folders support. If this existed at that time it would have saved us a lot of hassle...
- 13y ago
- blackjack48 13y agoIf I'm already using gmvault, is there any advantage to downloading it directly?
- magicalist 13y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855145
- thejerz 13y agoYes -- just to be clear, the submission you link to occurred before Google released the Gmail export feature.
- shmerl 13y agoUseful but you could do it with IMAP already.
- jebblue 13y agoI've had 4 "Failed - Network error" messages in a row.
- bwillard 13y agoWhen you create the Takeout or when you try to download the archive?
- jebblue 13y agoI created it twice successfully last night, I thought maybe the servers are overloaded so I waited to download the second one until this morning. Checked my Gmail, got the your archive download is ready email, clicked the link, logged into Google's site, clicked Download Archive...mine is several hundred megs in size, it gets between 60 and 150 megs downloaded then again this morning, it quits with the error I described. Maybe there's some bug relating to the size of my download but I'd think a few hundred megs shouldn't be an issue to download.
- lutusp 13y agoPerhaps you should choose a single category (like Gmail) of your Google content, download that, then go back and download another single category until you have it all.
- jebblue 13y agoIt would probably work but it's only a few hundred megs I'm talking about. I logged onto my Linode and created a 588 meg file with this: dd if=/dev/zero of=testing bs=196k count=3k oflag=dsync Then I downloaded it and it went fine. So the problem is on Google's side. The fact that I tried downloading the first archive so many times their service told me finally that I'd downloaded it too many times then the second archive failed around the same rough time frame. Their service is counting the failed downloads as successful, that's bad in itself.
- waterhouse 13y ago
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoIs this new? I'm pretty sure it's been around in some form for a couple of years at least.
- moonka 13y agoGmail was announced several weeks ago (maybe December?) as coming to Takeout, and last time I checked I didn't have it enabled, but now I do. It's by far my biggest file, my last export of all the services I was able to download was ~100MB, but this is at 3.5GB and climbing.
- coldtea 13y agoPerhaps preparing to turn off 'IMAP access' feature?
- porpoisemonkey 13y agoNot likely. You can only create a backup once every 24 hours which would be useless for importing into a mail client.
- krrrh 13y agoI think the idea here is that now they could turn off IMAP and not be accused of lock-in, whereas IMAP used to eh the only way to liberate your email. They won't turn off IMAP of course, because they would anger way too many mobile users.
- amiramir 13y agoI'll just ask the NSA for mine ;-)
- onida 13y agoWho do you think they created this feature for?
- anilshanbhag 13y agoI just requested an archive and I will be surprised if I get it any time soon. Gmail - 5GB, Drive - 3 GB, G+ Photos - 1.5 GB - this is going to be one huge zip file !!
- bwillard 13y agoJust as an FYI Takeout's zip files are limited to 2GB (for compatibility reasons) so you'll actually get a couple zip files, if you want just one file you need to pick one of the other archive formats.
- intull 13y agoWasn't this there before?
- emilyst 13y agoI'm glad they've rolled this out widely, but unfortunately, when I attempted to use it, it simply sent me a 5MB error log and not a single bit of archived data.
- grandpoobah 13y agoI ran it and it gave me a zip containing an html file called errors.html with a bunch of errors and no actual emails.
- balladeer 13y agoI checked this with a new/small account and it gave me the mails al right.
- aabalkan 13y agoSame here, I just got 14 MBs of errors.html and nothing else.
- hugi 13y agoTried running it twice, all I get are emails informing me they can't do it ( http://i.imgur.com/zlFgQX4.png http://i.imgur.com/zlFgQX4.png ).
- lutusp 13y agoThis error might have come up because you have an open Gmail client session running (or another Google service), or simply that the new service is completely overloaded right now.
- snowmaker 13y agoSame here. I got a 64MB errors.html file. No actual data. Hopefully some human is checking the logs and will be fixing this.
- stevewilhelm 13y ago+1 same issue. I have 10.6GB of email. Wonder if that might have something to do with it.
- LeicaLatte 13y agoThey took their time but this does look like the right way to do it.
- qwerta 13y agoYou should create backup every month...
- biafra 13y agoIt might be a coincident. But since I started creating an archive I do not get any more email to that account. And it already takes some hours.
- tanglesome 13y agoThis has been true since Dec. See: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/download-copy-of-your-gmail-and-google.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/download-copy-of-your-...
- kmfrk 13y agoI hope it will one day include my YouTube (favourites) - as I still get an empty result for archiving my YouTube profile. It requires Google+ to access that now, from what I've tried to research on it.
- jgalt212 13y agoFor large archives, 10GB in our case, we had issues exporting to gzip or bzip2--it would crash before the archive was completed. Sort of annoying in that it took almost 24 hours from the start of the archive creation to the crash event. The help desk could not resolve the issue for us. Originally, we chose gzip/bzip2 formats instead of getting a series of files with zip (i.e. zip max file size is 4GB) At end of the day, we had success choosing the zip archive format. We did not receive a series of zip files, but just one large uncompressed text file in mbox format. Our last big data dump was down back in late December 2013, so I am not sure if these issues persist regarding bzip/gzip2 and 10GB size archives.
- bumpy 13y agoI think this is Google's half hearted/half assed attempt at allaying the fears of those concerned about 'what Google might do next'. As a lot of you who have tried to export out have seen, this does not work satisfactorily or does not work at all! (See other's experiences in this thread). I myself tried to export gmail contacts out and found it does not work as expected and does not work at all for groups. Nor does it export full data in vc, like contact photos. Why not? It's supported in the file format so why not add it? Seems like they're making the fixing of export-out bugs a low priority. So low that its not even working at all for some. To me all this seems like deliberate negligence.
- chmars 13y agoThe new option is great but I am still very happy with a (payware) app called CloudPull. It can automatically backup all your Google Apps data and is not limited to Gmail but also covers Drive. http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/ http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/ CloudPull is OS X only. I'm sure there're are other great options to create Gmail backups independent from Google
- personlurking 13y agoIf I wanted to download my mbox file from Gmail and reupload it at a later date to Gmail (possibly another of my accounts), I could do that without a problem, right? Or will they just be a jumble of emails, out of order or something? I suppose at the least, they won't retain their labels.
- jason_slack 13y agoI'm getting "Service failed to retrieve this item." For every item I tried to export.
- treelovinhippie 13y ago1.4MB file. I don't think it worked lol
- vicaya 13y agoAnybody here tried this at all? I tried to get a takeout with my emails several times, all I got is on 2.3MB errors.html, telling "service cannot retrieve this item" over and over again.
- snowmaker 13y agoSame here.
- equivocates 13y agoIs there anyway to download using wget or curl? Google chrome isn't cutting mustard. After about 4 gigs, it gives me a fat error.
- ansimionescu 13y agoWell that's a FAT error then, not Chrome's fault. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/what-is-the-maximum-file-size-fat-fat32-ntfs-file/1663db6b-490e-4021-9e36-f7a6976ac0c0 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-f...
- Shish2k 13y ago> After about 4 gigs, it gives me a fat error. That sounds more likely to be an issue with your local storage (4GB being the limit for files on a FAT-formatted hard drive, IIRC). Though on the other hand, somebody still using FAT in this day and age seems a fairly unlikely explanation too :S
- nikbackm 13y agoWhat can you do with the downloaded mail archive? Would it be possible to load/import it into Thunderbird and get to view all the same folders as in Gmail now for example?
- blueskin_ 13y agoI'm surprised google are making it easier to escape.