Getting My Data Back From Google

Over the last year or so, I've been in the process of weening my digital life off of Google's services. There's a variety of reasons why I began doing this such as privacy concerns, the fact that Google routinely kills products, and the risk of losing access to my account (this would especially be problematic as I was heavily invested into the Google ecosystem) - however, I'll probably get into all these reasons another time.

This post is mostly a rant, but also a warning to anyone else out there trying to get your data back from Google's services. This has not been a fun experience I'll share another post about what I've switched to in place of these services, but ultimately I believe in privacy, security, diversification, and compartmentalization when considering an alternative.

Google Play Music

Using Google's Music Manager, I was able to download all the music I had uploaded to Google Play Music. Unfortunately, I had a series of issues like having some songs missing, albums and artists being split into multiple folders, and even "clean" versions of songs being downloaded rather than the original mp3 with "dirty" lyrics - I'm not exactly sure how this happened. Additionally, any file that had a name longer than 25 or so characters were shortened. For example a Boards of Canada song with the file named "A Beautiful Place Out In The Country.mp3" would be downloaded as "A Beautiful Place Out In .mp3". This becomes especially annoying if you have files of songs with guest artists.

Google Drive

This was a bit more simpler than the other services, although I was missing roughly 10% of my files when I had downloaded in bulk, especially folders with a large number of files. I used the web version of Google Drive for the most part, but I remembered Google's Sync tool. I was able to use Sync to download the rest of my files, unfortunately it's only available on Windows and Mac (no Linux support).

Google Photos

This has been by far the most frustrating experience of all and I believe that this process is intentionally difficult to make it harder to switch. This whole experience would have been a lot simpler had Google kept the Photos integrated into the Sync tool or if they still made it possible to manage/view your photos from Google Drive. The only way to get all of your photos at once is to use Google's Takeout tool which takes quite a while since I had around 80+ gbs of data in total and came out to 32 separate 2gb zip files.

• First and foremost, in my export I received other people's photos instead of my own! While reviewing some photos from the early 2010's, I stumbled across several pictures of people I didn't recognize in settings I was unfamiliar with. A few months later I received an email from Google informing me that some of my photos may have accidentally ended up in someone else's Takeout export.
• All of the metadata (ie the time, date, location, device, etc) have been stripped out of the original image and into a separate .json file. I'm still trying to figure out how to merge this file back into the original image, but there's no way to tell when the photo was taken other than the folder which only identifies the year.
• There's almost no organization to the photos and they're scattered into multiple folders.
• There are folders but missing data. For example, I had uploaded a folder titled "2005", but the only file in the folder is a .json.
• Some photos are not their original resolution and are basically the size of a thumbnail.

I'm still trying to figure out to get all my data exported intact from Google Photos. I'm considering going through the process again as it's possible one of the issues is a 2gb zip not being properly exported.

Google Play Books

I'd say about half of the books I had uploaded could not be downloaded - this includes both PDF and ePub file format. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why I wasn't able to download them. Some would download after 3 or 4 attempts but anything beyond this I just gave up. After dealing with Google Photos, I simply downloaded what I could and then deleted everything.

At the end of the day, I suggest against relying heavily on Google services. Their services are certainly easy and convenient, but I don't believe in sacrificing freedom and control for the sake of convenience. I've since opted to store my files locally with a redundant cloud backup of everything just in case my laptop explodes. I will write another post soon about replacements.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to hey@chuck.is.