Backing up Google#

I use a lot of Google Services: Drive, Photos, Youtube, Messages, Home, etc. They are pretty ubiquitous nowadays. It’s also a lot of information to move over to a new account.

Having created my account for google services, I started the arduous task of backing up my data so it doesn’t get lost. For nearly everything, there’s Google Takeout, which lets you make a backup of some or all of your Google Account data, with some caveats. Doing so is easy, just go to the Google Takeout page linked above, and you’ll be given a huge list of services you can back up. It’s quite a lot (I didn’t know that Google offered a service for a Journal or for Assignments). Fortunately, you can just select the critical ones you need. You can also specify the following:

  • Whether to use *.tgz or *.zip format
  • How large each individual back up file will be.

Depending on how much data you have selected, for instance a large number of files in Drive or Photos, this can take several hours or even days. Once I got an email notification that my files had finished backing up, I went to the link they offered and had to download 130 tarballs with a combined 189 GB of compressed data in them. Wowzers!

I then uncompressed each file via a quicky shell script and copied everything over to a Synology NAS I had (rsync to the rescue!). Since Synology provides a Cloud Sync tool that lets you sync a number of storage providers (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, .etc,), I set up my destination account in a new directory and then, after logging into the web interface, copied all my drive folders over.

Here, I made a mistake. I did a basic cut-n-paste of the files so that everything from my “old” Drive account was deleted. There are a number of problems with this:

  1. I lost all my starred favorites
  2. A Google Sheets file got lost

I wasn’t able to recover my starred favorites, but, thanks to my Takeout, I was able to restore all sheets. phew!

Caveats#

The one thing you can’t back up is purchased TV shows & movies from Google Play/TV/Youtube, so be prepared for that. For that reason, I’ll be keeping my old Google account around in the event I’d like to watch something. For any music uploaded to Youtube Music, you will be able to download those as part of Takeout.

Next up, my experience signing up for US Mobile!