One of the most frustrating things when it comes to using online services is getting your data from a service. However, Google has been working on ways to make retrieving data from a service easier and enable Google back up. Google takeout is one of the tools that can be used for this process. Basically, Google takeout is a service from Google that can be used to retrieve data from an online service. To be able to use it, one needs to have a Google account. Currently, takeout supports the following services:

• Buzz
• +1 rated web content.
• Google profiles.
• Google+
• Picasa web albums.
• Contacts and circles
• Docs
• Blogger.
• Voice
• Reader
• YouTube

With takeout, you can back up your Google+ circles, contacts and evens streams. Takeout will collect data in a zipped file for download. The good thing about Takeout is that it comes with the ability to archive everything. While this is a good thing, it can also mean that you will end up saving a lot of data, most of which may not be important. To ensure you only download and back up important data, ensure you click on ‘choose services’ to select preferred back up data.

Google back up – How to use Takeout

Using Google Takeout as Google back up is rather easy:

• To Google takeout homepage and sign in to Google.
• Choose the service you want to backup data from. It is possible to select all the services at a go or do it one by one based on your priority.
• Click on the red ‘create archive’ button at the bottom of the page.
• The backing up process starts by creating an archive file for your data.

This process may take a few seconds or minute, based on the size of the backup being created.

• After the Google back up is ready, navigate to the download tab and tap on the download button.

You will need to re-authenticate your Google account after which the down load automatically starts. Once the downloading process completes, you can open the archive. The data will be well organized in folders.

Google back up – Why using Google takeout is a good idea

When it comes to creating backups for contacts or data, most backup tools create the archive in unreadable formats. This means that the user has to go through the process of converting the data to readable format to be able to transfer to other media. However, Takeout creates the archive is ready to read format. This means that transferring the data to other services is easy and less time consuming.