| > Of course Google, as other BigTech companies was coherced [sic] to implement it mainly due to GDPR restrictions - so that any user can take the data he/she owns and move out to other place. Well, that's just simply false. Google Takeout was in development and released much earlier than GDPR was published. It was an internal project of a weird Google team known publicly as the "Google Data Liberation Front". I wasn't actually at Google during any of this, but I recall Google Takeout from ages ago, and it's hard to forget, in part because it seemed so novel for the time, and also the name "Data Liberation Front" stuck out as being surprisingly bold. (Of course, Takeout has probably expanded greatly due to fears of regulation, but according to Wikipedia it was in development for four years upon being released in 2011, and I don't think Google was as worried about data portability regulation by that point in their history.) -- That aside, I was actually genuinely curious to see how bad the process would be for me, as I've been gradually de-googling myself for years now. I chose to export my Google Photos library, which is apparently around 60 GiB. It isn't growing, because I no longer use Google Photos. I opted to just export them to 10 GiB tgz chunks to download directly. About an hour or so later, I got an e-mail with the download links. I'm currently downloading them. The download speed is tolerable: it's between 10 MiB/s and 30 MiB/s, jumping around a bit depending on the part file (probably random chance to some degree.) (Edit: I did indeed finish downloading the batch with no problems. Seems fairly complete. The formats are documented, not sure how much stuff supports them.) So at the very least this seems like a "YMMV" situation. For me, this works perfectly well, which is great news considering I didn't really have another contingency plan for this. Granted, I'm not sure what I'll do with the exported data yet. |
As for the way it works for me - I've tried multiple times and it always fails - but I backup to other cloud.