‘The Times of India’ brings you ‘Hack of the Day’—a new weekday series of quick, practical solutions to everyday hassles. Each hack is designed to save you time, money or stress, using tools and features within your reach—from government websites to everyday apps. In simple terms, it’s simple fixes for smarter living.Having an offline backup of your data such as emails, photos, and documents is a critical practice. It not only protects your data from accidental deletion but also from catastrophic failure (which is rare).
Sometimes, bots may flag accounts for suspicious activity, which may potentially lock you out of Gmail, Drive and Photos – rendering you unable to access your data. In this article, we are explaining how you can download all your Google data and save it in your hard drive.
What data you can export and download:
EmailDocumentsCalendarPhotosYouTube videos(Tip: If you can’t find some of your YouTube videos, check if you have a Brand Account. If you have a Brand Account, you may need to switch accounts.)
Step 1: Select data to include in your download archiveLog into your Google Account.Go to the Google Takeout page. Google products which you utilize and hold your data are automatically selected.If you don’t want to download data from a product, uncheck the box beside it.If you only want to download some of your data from a product, you may have the option to select a button like All data included List. Then, you can uncheck the box next to data you don’t want to include.Select Next step.
Step 2: Customise your archive formatUsers can choose the way they want their data to be downloaded. This include Google sending download link via email, or Add to dropbox/ OneDrive and more. If you choose this, Google will email you a link to download your Google data archive.For “Delivery method,” select Send download link via email.Select Create export.In the email that arrives, select Download archive.To download your Google data, follow the steps on the screen.Further, users can choose “Export type”: One-time archive or Scheduled exports as well as File type: Zip files or Tgz files.Step 3: Get your Google data archiveWhen the archive is created by using one of these options, Google will email you a link to its location. Depending on the amount of information in an account, this process could take from a few minutes to a few days. Google says most people get the link to their archive the same day that they request it.
