Re:Help Locked out of 10 years Gmail account
by toomuchtodo on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:54AM
(#34118585)
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 very year unfortunately).
> Automatically create an archive of your selected data every 2 months for one year. The first archive will be created immediately.
Re:Help Locked out of 10 years Gmail account
by jsnell on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:59AM
(#34118637)
Takeout was created in 2011, well before the GDPR existed or before there was any other kind of regulatory requirement for it.
Re:Help Locked out of 10 years Gmail account
by gatonegro on Saturday December 24, 2022 @01:51PM
(#34119847)
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.
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.