The Google account houses such a large amount of data that one of the worst nightmares of its users is that at some point they would be lost. Either by a server failure or by losing the password.
Takeout allows you to select all or only some of the data in your Google account to backup
Photographs, emails, messages, documents, contact book, calendar entries… almost a digital life inaccessible due to a failure. It could also happen that, due to a change of job or computer or mobile device, the user loses access to an account and wants to keep a copy of all documents and files related to that Google user account, always linked to a Gmail email address.
A setback that, fortunately, has remedy if a backup of the contents of the Google account is made thanks to a function specifically designed in the Alphabet platform for this purpose Google Takeout.
Just a remark: precisely in the case where the Gmail email address was provided by a company you might find that the Takeout function is disabled, so you would have to consult with the company itself about the possibility of backing up the employee’s email account.
These issues solved, the way to carry out a backup of the Google account is as follows:
-Access the web address “myaccount.google.com”
-Enter menu “Privacy and personalization – Manage your data and privacy”
-Download to the section “Download and delete your data”
-Select “Download your data”
This will take you to the Google Takeout page, which will allow specific data to be downloaded, for example only emails from Gmail By default the selection of all data from all platforms is enabledso you should uncheck those that you do not want to back up.
Of course, the more data from more platforms you activate to download, the longer this process will take and the more space it will occupy on the hard disk of the device where the information is stored. Google Takeout allows you to select the backup destination drive as well as the data format based on data categories.
In some categories, for example emails, Takeout allows you to select the type of emails to be stored, thus discarding promotional emails or downloading only some belonging to specific categories.
As regards the destination of the data, in addition to the device itself or an external hard drive Takeout also allows you to select that the backup is stored in the Cloud on Cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and the like in a compressed file, or in several, depending on the size of the resulting file. Other options include setting periodic backups (every two months, every year…).
