Export Gmail and Google Calendar Data

Google Takeout now lets you export your calendars and it will soon add a similar feature for Gmail. The calendar exporting feature is not new - you could find it in the Google Calendar settings, but it's nice to see that Google Takeout gets more comprehensive and adds support for new services.

The Gmail exporting feature is completely new and it will be gradually released next month. It will let you download a big MBOX file you can import in mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. You can also use this feature to backup your Gmail messages and read them offline.

"You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data," informs Google.

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Google Takeout's New Interface

A few weeks ago, Google updated the Takeout interface and it's now much easier to download all your data. The service supports 17 products: Google Drive, YouTube, Blogger, Google+ Photos, Contacts, Hangouts, Location History and more.

When you click "create an archive", Google selects all the products that are available and shows the size of the ZIP archive you can download. Archives larger than 2GB will be split into multiple ZIP files. You can switch to .TGZ (.tar.gz) or .TBZ (.tar.bz2) tarball files, but you need a software like 7-zip to open them if you use Windows.

By default, all the products are selected. You can click "select all" and check the data you want to download. Click each product to find more about the data you download, change the format and sometimes even filter the data.

For example, you can download Drive files from certain folders and change the export formats. You can export contacts and Google+ circles as CSV, HTML or vCard and select the blogs and photo albums you want to download.

After creating an archive, you'll get an email when it's ready for download and the link will be available for a week. You can find all your archives in the "my archive" section.

"Remember, your data is important! Do not download archives on public computers. It's important that you have control over your data. If you have decided to take your data elsewhere, please research the data export policies of your destination. Otherwise, if you ever want the leave the service, you may have to leave important stuff like your photos behind," informs Google.

Update: Takeout doesn't work that well. I created 3 archives (zip, tar.gz, tar.bz2) for all the supported Google services and 2 of the archives failed at 100%. The only archive I could download included a 100 KB errors.html with a long list of files that couldn't be downloaded (most of them were Drive files Google+ posts).

"We tried our best to get your archive 100% right, but ran into a few problems as we were putting it together. Instead of canceling the entire archive, we've created this list of items that weren't properly included. Click any of the names to be taken directly to the item in question, and you can download it from there," informs the page.

I also noticed that not all my YouTube videos were downloaded. For some of them, YouTube downloaded HTML pages which mention that they were matched by the Content ID system. "Because someone else has claimed the copyright on some, or all, of your video YouTube has a policy of not allowing this video to be exported." It's probably because I used YouTube's "add music" feature.

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

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When Did You Create Your Gmail Account?

Here's a simple way to find when you've created your Gmail account. You can always find the oldest message from your account by visiting this page https://mail.google.com/mail/#all/p1000000: you'll get an error message and Gmail will redirect to a page that shows the oldest messages from your account. The problem is that this is not a reliable way to determine when the account was created: maybe you've deleted some messages, maybe you've imported messages from other accounts.

If you've joined Google+, you can quickly find the exact date. Go to Google Takeout, click "Transfer your Google+ connections to another account" (don't worry, you don't have to do that), enter your password and you can see the date when you've created your Gmail account in the blue box at the bottom of the page.

Why would you need this information? For example, Google's account recovery form includes a question about this. "If you find yourself locked out of your account and none of your other recovery options work, your last option is to visit our password-assistance page and fill out our Account Recovery form. (...) Since Google doesn't collect a lot of information about you when you sign up for an account, we'll ask you questions like when you created your account, what Google services you use, and who you email frequently (if you use Gmail)."

I haven't tested this, but I assume this trick also works for non-Gmail Google accounts.

{ via TechAirlines }

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