If you’ve used Google services for more than a few years, your account holds a significant record of your life. Photos from years of memories. Emails spanning relationships, jobs, and decisions. Contacts, location history, documents, calendar events, search history. Years of activity organised by Google’s infrastructure and quietly subject to Google’s terms.
Google Takeout lets you download all of it. Most people don’t know it exists. Most of those who do have never used it. And most of those who have used it have stopped at the download step — which turns out to be only the beginning.
Here’s how to export your Google data, what you actually get (and what you don’t), and what to do with it afterward to genuinely hold an independent copy.
What Google Takeout Includes
Google Takeout (available at takeout.google.com) lets you export data from a long list of Google services. The ones that matter most for personal memory and life records:
Google Photos: All photos and videos in your library, plus JSON sidecar files containing timestamps, GPS coordinates, album membership, and titles. The originals are exported at their original resolution — not compressed.
Gmail: Your full email archive in MBOX format, a standard format readable by email clients including Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and others.
Google Drive: All files you’ve created or uploaded, exported in standard formats — Docs as DOCX, Sheets as XLSX, Slides as PPTX. Files you’ve uploaded in native formats (PDFs, images) come out as-is.
Contacts: Your address book in VCard format, compatible with every major contact manager.
Calendar: All events in ICS format, importable into any calendar application.
Location History: If you’ve had location history enabled, a JSON file containing a timeline of your physical movements. This is typically a large and intimate dataset.
Search and YouTube History: JSON logs of your search queries and watch history, if you’ve kept these on.
Chrome Browsing History: Your browsing history if you’ve been signed into Chrome.
You can select all of these at once or choose specific services. The export can be delivered as a download link emailed to you, or pushed directly to Dropbox, OneDrive, a separate Google Drive account, or Box.
How to Start an Export
The process is straightforward:
- Go to myaccount.google.com and sign in with the account you want to export
- Click Data & Privacy in the left sidebar (or find it at the top of the privacy settings page)
- Scroll to Download or delete your data and click Download your data
- Select which services to include — either choose all or select specific ones
- Choose your options: file type (ZIP is easiest for most users), archive size limit, and delivery method
- Click Create export
Google processes the request asynchronously. For large accounts — anything with years of photos or a full email archive — processing can take several hours to a few days. You’ll receive an email when the download is ready. The download link remains active for seven days.
Large accounts are split into multiple archive files, each up to the size limit you selected. Plan for this: a ten-year photo library can easily result in dozens of ZIP files.
What You Actually Get
The export is more complete in some areas than others, and a few things are worth knowing before you begin.
Photos
You get the original files at original resolution — this is the most important thing. However, the metadata (GPS coordinates, dates, titles) is separated into JSON sidecar files rather than being embedded in the image EXIF data.
This creates a practical problem: if you simply extract the ZIP files and browse the photos, the timestamps and locations won’t be visible in most photo apps, because they’re in separate JSON files rather than embedded in the images.
Solving this requires a metadata re-embedding step. Several open-source tools exist for this purpose (search for “Google Photos Takeout metadata fix” for current options). The process is somewhat technical but not beyond most users. Plan a few hours to do this properly for a large library.
Gmail
The MBOX export contains your full email archive. To read it, you’ll need an email client that supports MBOX. Mozilla Thunderbird is free, available on all desktop platforms, and handles MBOX well. Apple Mail on macOS can import MBOX files. The archive won’t include emails you’ve already permanently deleted — only what’s currently in your account, including Spam and Trash.
Google Docs and Drive
Conversion to Microsoft Office formats preserves most content, but complex formatting — especially in documents that use advanced Google Docs features — may not survive perfectly. For archival purposes where long-term readability matters more than editability, exporting Docs as PDF creates more stable files.
What You Won’t Get
The Takeout export is what Google makes available through this interface. It doesn’t include the derived data Google holds about you — your advertiser profile, inferred demographic and interest categories, internal analytics about your behaviour, or insights derived from your usage patterns. This data exists and shapes what you see across Google’s products, but it’s not exportable in a usable form.
Your Takeout archive is the content layer of your Google account. The behavioural layer stays with Google.
The Storage Problem
The most common failure mode in “leaving Google” or “backing up Google” is the step after the export. Files download, sit in a Downloads folder for weeks, and eventually get moved to another cloud service — Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, or even a second Google account.
This is understandable. These services are convenient and familiar. But it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
If you export your photos from Google Photos and upload them to Dropbox, your photos are now subject to Dropbox’s privacy policy, encrypted with Dropbox’s keys, accessible to Dropbox’s systems, and covered by Dropbox’s relationship with government requests. You’ve traded one cloud platform for another.
For a genuine private copy, the options are:
External hard drive or NAS (network attached storage): Physical storage you own and control. No third party holds it, no privacy policy applies. The limitations are also real: you’re responsible for backup (a hard drive that’s your only copy is not a backup), no access from other devices without extra setup, and no geographic redundancy unless you maintain offsite copies.
Zero-knowledge cloud storage: Services like Tresorit or Proton Drive encrypt files on your device before upload, so the provider never holds the decryption keys. Your files are stored off-device with genuine technical privacy protections. These services cost more than the major providers but offer what they can’t.
Purpose-built private storage: For photos and personal memories specifically, services designed around privacy-first storage combine accessibility (available on your phone, across devices) with explicit commitments on data practices.
The right answer depends on your threat model, technical comfort, and how important remote access is. But the key insight is: exporting is not the same as owning. Where you store the export determines whether you’ve actually gained privacy or just moved the trust problem.
Organising the Export
A successful Google export produces gigabytes of data across multiple archive files. Before this becomes a useful personal library, it needs to be organised.
For photos: Fix the metadata first, using a tool that reads the JSON sidecar files and embeds the timestamps and GPS data into the image EXIF fields. Then sort into a date-based folder structure. A well-organised photo library uses year/month folders and consistent naming. The Google Takeout export uses Google’s internal naming, which is often not date-sorted.
For Gmail: Import the MBOX into Thunderbird to browse and search it. You can also keep it as a compressed MBOX archive in encrypted storage — it’s readable later as long as you have an MBOX-compatible client, which has been standard for decades.
For Drive documents: Convert to PDF for archival fidelity if editability isn’t required. PDFs are more stable across decades than DOCX files, which may have compatibility issues with future software.
For contacts and calendar: Import directly into your current contact manager and calendar app using the standard VCard and ICS formats. These formats are universally supported.
Exporting Is Not Deleting
One thing that surprises many users: downloading your data from Google Takeout does not delete it from Google. You receive a copy; Google retains the original.
If your goal is a private backup — having your own copy in addition to Google’s — the export process is sufficient. If your goal is to remove your data from Google’s infrastructure, you need separate steps: deleting content from individual services, requesting account deletion, or both.
Under GDPR, you have the right to erasure — the right to request that Google delete your personal data. Under CCPA, you have similar rights. These rights come with exceptions (legal holds, legitimate business purposes), but they are meaningful. The relevant settings are in the Data & Privacy section of your Google account.
If you request account deletion, Google provides a standard grace window before deletion is permanent and irreversible. The export-then-delete sequence is the right order: export first, verify the export is complete and accessible, then proceed with deletion.
Making the Backup Permanent
A one-time Google Takeout export captures a snapshot of your account as it exists today. For an ongoing private backup — one that stays current as new content accumulates — you need either a scheduled recurring export (Google lets you set up automatic exports to Dropbox or Drive on a six-month cycle) or a solution that continuously captures new content.
For photos specifically, the most effective ongoing solution is to stop adding new photos to Google Photos and route new content directly to private storage from the moment of capture. Photos that never enter Google’s system don’t need to be exported later.
This requires a change in habit — using a different app for photo backup on your phone — but it’s the only approach that gives you a continuously-current private archive without periodic manual exports.
Using daftei as a Destination
For photos and personal files, daftei is available on iOS, Android, and web as a private memory vault. Files are encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.3. No advertising, no data sales, no AI training on your content for third parties. GDPR and CCPA compliant. 5 GB free; unlimited on Pro at $5.99/month or $44.99/year.
If you export your Google Photos library and want to store it somewhere private rather than simply a different cloud platform with different terms, daftei is one option for that destination. The app is available at /app/login on web, and on iOS and Android.
The more durable takeaway: owning your personal data doesn’t happen through a settings toggle. It requires a deliberate export, a decision about where to store it, and an ongoing choice to use infrastructure that reflects your privacy values rather than the defaults of platforms whose interests don’t fully align with yours.
Google Takeout is the starting point. The destination is what matters.