Starting today Google is rolling out a new feature that lets users export a copy of their emails on Gmail, Calendar data, and various other Google products, granting users the ability to make an offline backup of their data or easily migrate to a new service.
It’s important to note that exporting your data from Google doesn’t delete your data from the service. This is only a new feature that Google is offering to customers to get offline access to their data.
Are there any limitations? Yes:
- You can only create one backup per day.
- You’re allow to download the same backup up to 5 times.
- If the backup exceeds 2GB, it’ll split in 2GB chunks, just because the default container is .zip and this format has a limit of 2GB. You can choose other formats like .tbz and .tgz to increase the backup size up to 50GB — avoid the split.
Instructions
To export your mail and calendars is pretty simple, just go to the “Download a copy of your data”, choose your format, and click Create Archive. The amount of time it takes to create a new archive will depend on different factors including the amount of data you have and the service workload.
You can also download other Google products data, such as YouTube, Drive, Voice, Google+ Photos, Contacts, and much more — a total of 14 services. Just remember to click the “Show these product link”, and choose the products you want to backup or migrate.
Also note that you can change the format of your data, for example, Contacts by default is set to be archived as vCard, because it’s the most common format use by different online services and software, but you can change this setting to to CSV or HTML. The same is true for all the other services, my recommendation is: if you don’t know, probably the default settings are OK. (For more info visit Google support page)
Once the backup is ready for download, you’ll get any email with a download link.
Source Google
Mauro Huculak is a Windows expert and the Editor-in-Chief who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He is also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 12 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows, software, and related technologies, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 20 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me.