Download and Backup your Google Data using Google Takeout

Google Takeout is a free service offered by Google, created by a team of engineers known worldwide as Data Liberation Front. The service which is just like any other Google service provides an easy way for you to download and backup your data from services associated with Google. It is reliable, and the best part is it allows you to log in with your Gmail username and password, no signing up to a new offering!

This post shows how using Google Takeout, you can backup and download all your Google Data – which includes, Blogger, Google Plus, YouTube, Bookmarks, Gmail contacts & calendar, Photos, Play Music, Maps and other data.

Download Google Data using Google Takeout

I used the service for a brief period and found it to be really simple and straightforward. Initially, I logged in using my Gmail account details and the service prompted me to either recover essential/desired data from all or choose individual services.

Choosing a service

For testing purposes, I chose ‘Google Circles’.

If you want, you can select everything to download from. Google Takeout, immediately started calculating the estimated size and the number of files in the package, i.e. ‘Google Circle’.

Configuring options

It then asked me to configure some options. I preferred proceeding further with the preset options for me. Here, if you want you can choose to save the data in open, portable formats, so you find it convenient to import it to other services easily.

Creating Archive

Later, I saw a link – Create Archive, highlighted in red. Upon clicking this link, I was taken to a new page which displayed the package under the Downloads tab. If you’ve created a previous download, it’ll show that one on the bottom. To my surprise, I noticed the downloads were pretty quick – less than a few minutes for any download.

Downloading files

You are now ready to download the package to the desired place on your computer. Before this, you might need to enter your password again for downloading the package, which Google prefers for security reasons. Having no other options to evade the feature, I agreed!