[crazygringo]

It's certainly 100% useful for me, not "performative" at all, but that's because I use it all for standard stuff -- e-mail/contacts/calendar, files/Docs/Sheets/Slides/photos. None of that is proprietary to Google (e-mails are mbox, Docs files are converted to Word, etc.).

Sure if you want to download your Maps location history or YouTube comment history as JSON it's there too, but I don't think too many people care about importing that stuff elsewhere. Competing services are obviously free to build their own importer if they want.

But all the normally "important" content we think about like e-mails and documents and photos, it's all there just zipped up. Nothing trapped inside proprietary JSON or anything like that. And it's just peace of mind knowing that I've always got a local backup of everything.

[ocdtrekkie]

Well, for example, what mail services will allow you to upload an MBOX file? (I'll give you one... Fastmail added support for it about six years after I left Gmail, but that wasn't until like last year.) You can't carry that export method over to most mail services, which if they support importing, require IMAP (and hence access to your current account in good standing).

Offering Takeout doesn't actually make it very easy to migrate to a competitor, is my point. Sure, you can get the data out, but very little will actually ingest Takeout in any useful way. And heck, I think last time I used Takeout, it preferred to issue things in .tar.gz archives, and good lunch to any non-HN user on figuring out what to do with those.

[Daegalus]

Well I do regular backups and they do ZIP nowadays.

And it's not Googles responsibility to make it easy for you to import to other services.

They use open formats and standards in their export. It's up to you and the other providers to mess with it. A lot of them can import directly from Gmail over API.

Mbox can easily be converted to maildir. Which can be used by thunderbird, not much, sup, etc.

I know people hate on Google but in this case it's not on them to make it easy. The fact that you can export it into open standards is all they have to do.

Finally, this is probably their way of creating a dark pattern. Especially for email. Export into an old, less used nowadays format.

[1123581321]

You can import your mbox emails into lots of email serves via a desktop client. Depending on the client you might have to import into a second location, select all and then drag over to your live account. IMAP will sync up your imported email.

[unmole]

> I think last time I used Takeout, it preferred to issue things in .tar.gz archives

What is the intersection of people who decided to use Google takeout but are incapable of figuring out how to extract a tarball?

[Turing_Machine]

> t preferred to issue things in .tar.gz archives, and good lunch to any non-HN user on figuring out what to do with those.

The built-in Archive Utility on macOS handles .tar.gz just fine, as does 7-Zip on Windows.