Google Takeout: Seven Days and Five Downloads

Google holds more of most people's lives than any other company on this site — fifteen years of email, an entire photo library, every document, the calendar, the account history.

It also built one of the best export tools in the industry, and then attached a delivery mechanism that quietly defeats the people who need it most.

The breadth is genuinely excellent

Takeout lets you "export and download your data for the Google products you use", with a product-by-product selector covering email, documents, calendar, photos, YouTube videos, and registration and account activity.

That last one is easy to skip past and worth noticing. Being able to export the record of the account itself — when it was created, what was registered — is unusual, and it is the kind of thing a company builds when it has decided to take portability seriously rather than to satisfy a requirement.

Compared with most products in this category, where "export" means one CSV of one object type, Takeout is a different order of thing. On coverage alone it would score near the top.

The two limits that undo it

Then you read the delivery terms, and they compound in an unfortunate way.

"Your archive expires in about 7 days."

"We only allow each archive to be downloaded 5 times; after that, please request another archive."

Individually, both are reasonable. Google is not obliged to store your archive indefinitely, and a download cap is a sensible abuse control.

Together, applied to the accounts that need Takeout most, they are a genuine problem. Consider someone with a 400GB photo library on a domestic connection:

• The archive takes a day or two to build — Google warns the process "could take from a few minutes to a few days".
• Downloading 400GB takes many hours, possibly days, and will almost certainly be interrupted at least once.
• Each interrupted attempt potentially consumes one of five.
• The whole thing expires in about seven days.

It is entirely possible to run out of download attempts and clock before you have successfully retrieved your own photographs. Not because anything failed, but because the limits were designed around a smaller account than yours.

The two settings that fix it

Both are in the Takeout interface and both are easy to skip.

Set a smaller maximum archive size. Takeout lets you choose the largest file it will produce, and splits the export across several if needed. The instinct is to pick the largest option and get it over with; the correct move is the opposite. Many smaller files mean a failed download costs you one small file rather than one enormous one, and each file gets its own progress you do not have to repeat.

Deliver to another cloud service. Takeout will send the archive directly to Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive or Box. For a large export this is transformative, because a cloud-to-cloud transfer runs between two datacentres rather than through your broadband — the seven-day window and the five downloads stop being a race you can lose.

If you are exporting a large Google account and you take one thing from this page, take that one.

What "exported" means for Docs and Sheets

Worth being clear-eyed about, because the file count will look complete.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides are not files in the ordinary sense — they are documents that live inside Google's systems. Exporting them means converting them into something else, and conversion is lossy in ways that vary by document.

A simple text document converts cleanly. A spreadsheet full of formulas, references to other sheets, and conditional formatting converts into something that opens and does not necessarily behave. Sharing permissions and collaboration state do not travel at all, because they are properties of Google's platform rather than of your data.

So the export is complete in the sense that nothing is missing, and incomplete in the sense that some of what you get is a photograph of a working thing. Open a sample from each product before you delete anything — particularly your most complex spreadsheet, which is the one most likely to disappoint.

What Takeout does that others should copy

Two things.

It is free, for everyone. There is no tier you must buy to leave, which distinguishes it from products where the useful export format sits behind an upgrade. Given Google's position, charging for exit would have been trivially easy and it does not.

It exports across products at once. Most companies make you leave one service at a time. Takeout treats your account as a single thing, which is how you actually experience it.

The verdict

24 out of 30. An excellent export tool with a delivery mechanism that punishes exactly the accounts it should serve best.

Nothing here is hidden — Google states the expiry, the download cap and the processing time plainly, which is why documentation clarity scores well. But a limit you were told about is still a limit, and the seven-day, five-download combination is the single most likely reason a Google export fails.

Plan a fortnight, split the archive small, and send it cloud-to-cloud. Do those three things and the score for your purposes is considerably higher than 24.

For the wider point about what a downloaded copy is and is not protecting you from, see cloud storage vs backup.