Google Takeout: Easily Liberate and Backup Your Data From Google
The Data Liberation Front team has launched a new service called Google Takeout, allowing users to liberate their data and create backup of all Google products.
Takeout service basically makes it easy for the end-user to back up all their data stored in their Google Account. This way they can later use the backed up data into a new account or at a different service provider.
Using the Takeout service, users can now download all the information related to Google Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, Profile and Stream. “These are just the beginning: we will be adding more Google products as time goes on, so stay tuned” said Brian Fitzpatrick, The Data Liberation Front.
With the click on a button, back up of all the data starts and wrapped into a single zip file for download. You can see a quick overview of the total number of files it is backing up and the estimate size of those files.
How to use Takeout to Liberate Your data?
For using Takeout service, first you need to login to your Google Account. After logging in, visit google.com/takeout.
For liberating all the data, simple click on the Create Archive button.
If you want to take backup of each service individually, click on the Choose services tab and select the services that you want to back up.
You are than shown the estimated number of files and file size. Click on Create Archive button to continue.
You will see a statistics of the files which are getting archived. If everything is going good, than the progress bar will be green. If its red, than try again.
After the backup is complete, you will see the Download button, click on it to get back your data.
Facebook has a similar backup option which lets users download all their photos, videos and other data related to their Facebook account. Facebook compiles all the information on the back-end and then emails the user when the file is ready instead of displaying the backup process in real-time.
“We believe that if we make it easy for you to leave Google, we’ll have to work just that much harder to make sure you don’t,” the Data Liberation Front said in the video unveiling the service.
What are your thoughts about this new service? Will you be able to trust more in “Don’t be evil” motto because of Takeout?