What Is the Best Alternative to Google Takeout?

Summary: In this article, you will learn about the Google Takeout alternative and the features of Google Takeout, how to use it, and some of its alternatives. In today’s digital era, data management and transfer have become an important task. However, you can make use of Google Takeout service to export your data from Google's services. But, like every tool, there are a few limitations of the Google Takeout too.?

Table of Contents

1. Google Takeout: An Introduction
2. How to Use Google Takeout?
3. What is Google Takeout Archive?
4. Disadvantages of Google Takeout
5. An Automated Tool as an Alternative to Google Takeout
6. Wrapping Up
7. Frequently Asked Queries (FAQs)

In the world of data, using different services like Google Drive, Gmail, or YouTube is very common. But, If you want to take a backup or transfer your data,? how do you proceed?

Google Takeout is a tool that allows you to export your data from Google products. By using this, you can download your emails, photos, videos, and many other types of data simultaneously. In this article, we will discuss in detail the features of Google Takeout, how to use it, and its disadvantages and alternatives. However, it contains some cons. If you are looking for a smooth and more efficient solution to handle your data you’re in the right place. Let's start the article by knowing what Google Takeout is.

Google Takeout: An Introduction

Google Takeout is a free service provided by Google that delivers the facility to their users for downloading the data present in your Gmail emails, Google Drive files, Contacts, YouTube videos, or any other place. It acts like a digital backup system However, the main purpose of using it is to download your data in a secure format on your computer and transfer it to any other services or devices that are required according to the organizational goals. Moreover, this tool gives you the ZIP file or TGZ format of the data which contains the backup of the selected data.

How to Use Google Takeout?

Google Takeout is easy to use if you are familiar with the steps but, everyone goes for the better alternative to Google Takeout. However, here are the steps that help you to use this tool efficiently.

Step 1. Firstly, log in to your Google account with the credential IDs.

Step 2. Visit the website of Google Takeout or search for it. However, You can go to the website by using this link https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout.??

Step 3. Open the Google Takeout website and select the data from the given list that you want to export.

Note: You can select specific Google services like Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive, etc.

Step 4. Choose the export format such as ZIP or TGZ from the given option.

Step 5. After selecting data, click on the "Create Archive" button.

Note: Google Takeout may take time depending on the size of the data for processing and then it will send the link for downloading the files.

From the above steps, you can easily launch Google Takeout, however, after exporting the data. In addition, If the provided link is not working you can type “Google Takeout” on the search bar with any browser to visit the website of it. Moreover, before starting the exporting, you need to check the internet connectivity, and storage space also clean the cookies, and make use of incognito mode. Now, let us go through the Google Takeout archive to better understand the Google Takeout alternative.

What is Google Takeout Archive?

Google Takeout archive is a zip file that is used to back up the selected data. When you are exporting your files and folder Takeout organizes the data into a compressed format that provides you the downloadable link. Using this link, you can easily access and transfer your data.

Also Read: How to merge two Google accounts?

Disadvantages of Google Takeout

Google Takeout, while a convenient tool for data exporting comes with several downsides also. However, if any tool has advantages it contains disadvantages also, depending on the nature of the tool and whether to perform the high-level task. Let's discuss some of the drawbacks of Google Takeout for choosing the better alternatives in brief.

• Takes a lot of time- If you are exporting a large amount of data from Google Drive or any other platform can be a slow process. It makes the productivity of the organization slow. Imagine you have a large Google Photos library. Google Takeout has to process them and compress all the photos, which can take a lot of time on Google's end.? After that, you may get an email that your data is ready for download, but it may be a large archive containing many compressed files. Downloading these files, with slow internet, can be time-consuming.
• Manual Effort- Since the tool does not contain any automation within it which means you have to start the backup process yourself, which requires manual efforts that can be boring and time-consuming for regular use.
• Data organization loss- If talk about the structure of the data stored in Google Drive while exporting the structure will change and make it hard to re-shape again and to organize. However, If you have a complex folder structure with subfolders for different tasks, they might be exported together in the Takeout archive, making it difficult to find specific files later.
• No Direct Cloud Transfer- Google Takeout doesn't support direct transfers to other cloud services. Since you need to download the data first, to export it to another service or platform. However, it requires extra steps to move your data elsewhere that's why an alternative is better than Google Takeout.?
• Storage Issues- When you are transferring the files and folder you need a huge amount of local storage space to keep all the exported data, which can be challenging if your storage is not available or full.
• Full Backups Only- In each cycle of exporting Takeout can take full backup as the cycle starts from the scratch to end. However, there is no option for incremental and half backups, which causes unnecessary data duplicacy.

These are the limitations mentioned above that make Google Takeout less useful for smooth and effective data management.?

An Automated Tool as an Alternative to Google Takeout

If you are facing problems while dealing with the limitations of Google Takeout, you can make use of any professional tool as an alternative. There are many tools available in the market, one of the automated solutions that comes out of the boxes is the G Suite Migration Tool which is used to migrate the files and folders present in Google Drive or any other location in a few steps. However, it provides a useful solution and a seamless and user-friendly interface for data transferring.?

Wrapping Up

In this article, we will discuss the Google Takeout alternative. However, it is a useful tool that helps to export the data from the Google services to the local storage. But it comes with many limitations. If you are finding difficulty in dealing with the limitations of Google Takeout, then make use of any alternative or better solution that fits your organizational requirements. And also, handle the data transfer and management smoothly without any destructuring or data loss. Through this article, hope you have got a clear understanding of the alternative to Google Takeout.

Frequently Asked Queries (FAQs)

Que) Is Google Takeout free for everyone?

Ans) Yes, It is the free service provided by Google to its users that provides the facility to export the data.

Que) Is it possible to migrate Google Docs data?

Ans) Yes, you can make use of it for exporting data from the cloud to the local storage, however, you have to follow the manual process or make use of any third-party tool.

Que) How can you access data downloaded using Google Takeout?

Ans) To extract the downloaded data you need to unzip the zip file. After that, you can access the data in different folders.

Also See: Migrate Google Drive to Another Account