How to back up all your Google data with just a few clicks!
SEAN PARKER
Best known for: Co-founding Napster and Facebook’s first President
Sean Parker co-founded the file-sharing service Napster with Shawn Fanning shortly after high school. Napster was probably the first peer-to-peer music sharing service, with 80 million registered users at its peak. However artistes like Metallica and major record labels took objection to their material being released for free and sued Napster, causing it to shut down. Parker has had the last laugh though, as he later helped Spotify (then, a member of the board) negotiate deals with various music labels to stream music legally on the platform. Parker was also instrumental in the early development of Facebook; his role is also dramatized in the movie, The Social Network.
PICTURE (BACKGROUND) 123RF, (SEAN PARKER) ANDREW MAGER/FLICKR/CREATIVE COMMONS
Many of us use and rely on Google's services, be it Gmail, Google Maps, Photos, Drive, or even Keep. Even if you're an iOS or a Windows diehard, it's hard to totally avoid using Google products (think the Chrome browser). However, have you ever thought of what's going to happen to your data if a Google service suddenly goes away; or how do you bring your data to a nonGoogle service? Turns out, backing up your Google data is as simple as clicking a few buttons.
THE SOLUTION: GOOGLE TAKEOUT
You can choose what data you want to include in a Takeout archive.
There are over 40 types of data spanning across the whole Google ecosystem you can download and archive using Takeout.
The obvious ones include things such as as your bookmarks, contacts, photos, and mail. But you can also pull out and save the more obscure information that you've accumulated over the years, such as your responses in Google research studies, images you've uploaded to Street View, and even saved links from Search and Maps.
You can also instruct Takeout to export every two months for a year.
The great thing about Takeout is that you can select what data to include in the archive. Download everything Google has on you or just records of your activity data - it's your choice.
You can also customize the archive format, such as the file type (.zip or.tgz). By default, Google caps the archive size to 2GB so any archive larger than this size will be spilt into multiple files. The max an archive file can go is 50GB.
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