When you first hear the term Google Takeout, it sounds as if Google is getting ready to open its own chain of Google restaurants. While they supposedly have a great Google cafeteria, the only thing Google Takeout is serving is your data.
What is Google Takeout?
Google Takeout is a tool from Google to help you “download a copy of your data stored within Google products.”
This means that if you use YouTube, you’ll be able to download an entire archive of your videos. At last count, we had 270+ videos on our YouTube channel. That’s a lot of work we definitely want to keep a backup of should YouTube ever go down.
What kind of data can I download from Google Takeout?
Google Takeout is a pretty remarkable product. Here is a list of the Google products you can download data for using Takeout.
How to use Google Takeout?
Google Takeout is pretty straight-forward to use. Simply follow these steps.
1. Login to Google Takeout
2. Select the data you want to download
You can choose to download all of your data at once or be selective about the data you download. If you have previously used Takeout to download your data from Google, there is a downloads tab that you can choose to look at past downloads.
3. Select “create archive”
When you select “create archive,” Google will begin to download your data.
Note: In my experience, it only takes a few minutes to download your Google data from Takeout.
4. Click “download” and save your file to your desktop (it downloads a zip file)
Once Google has finished with your data, select “download” to save a copy to your computer. If you like, you can unzip the file and check out your data that Google downloaded.
One thing I like most about this is how organized your data is.
Note: if you have previously used Google Takeout to download your data, it will appear below your current archive.
Is Google Takeout helpful?
Overall, I find Google Takeout to be an extremely fast and efficient product from Google. I like how I can download an archive of my data and know that I can have this in case something ever goes wrong or I simply just want to be able to reference my past content.
One thing I wish it had were a way to schedule a backup. Right now, you’re left to use Takeout to download your Google data on your own time.
Question: Give Google Takeout a try and let me know what you think about it. Did you have any issues using Takeout to download your Google data? How fast was it for you? You can leave a comment by clicking here.