[gatonegro]

A few days ago I was going through an old Gmail account, and decided to get my data through Takeout. Told me it'd take a few hours, and the next day I had a link ready. Click the link, enter the password, it tells me I need a verification code that it wants to send to an address that stopped existing 15 years ago.

As it turns out, Google is not sufficiently convinced that I am in fact the owner of the account, so it refuses to let me download the data. I don't feel inclined to spend time trying to figure out this nonsense, but thankfully none of the information in that account is particularly important. I'll take it as a sign that I should just move away from Google, because next time the information on an account could be actually important, and I'd be screwed.

[blacklight]

Takeout is a feature that Google was kind of forced to implement because of GDPR compliance. But they still try their best to make it so bad that people won't think of using it.

First, getting to a point where you can actually schedule the creation of a zip takes a lot of clicking around - just to make sure that people won't bump into it unless they're explicitly searching for it.

Second, the process is painfully slow (on purpose). Last time I used it was to download my YouTube subscriptions and playlists to import them into my Piped instance. Even though I only have about 100 subscriptions, and only two playlists with about 20 items each, the process took almost two days to complete. By then I had already made a script that scraped the content from their HTML (and it only took me 5 minutes), and another one that did the same but using the YouTube API. If it takes less than a second to get the playlists and subscriptions of a user, I don't see a single reason why generating a Takeout CSV with the same information should take 2 days. I was determined (and tech-savvy) enough to script my way out of it, but many users just get discouraged and give up the idea of exporting their Google data entirely.

[toomuchtodo]

If you use a cloud storage provider Takeout supports (Dropbox, OneDrive, Box), it can be configured to auto export on a cadence. I have Takeout scheduled to export every two months to my Dropbox /apps path (you have to renew this schedule every year unfortunately).

> Automatically create an archive of your selected data every 2 months for one year. The first archive will be created immediately.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

[gatonegro]

I tried Takeout on my main account, and I have to say I'm surprised. Took about an hour to process and it allowed me to download everything.

While I was waiting on that, I finally paid for a proper email service and migrated my domain, so I have a copy of my Gmail data and a working, Google-free email service now.

[jsnell]

Takeout was created in 2011, well before the GDPR existed or before there was any other kind of regulatory requirement for it.