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Comment by handruin | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested to know what the pros and cons are of this utility vs using the Google takeout functionality? I like the idea of this project but I don't know what it would gain me over Google's native export? Is it the restoration that's missing from Google's service?

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

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My coworker and I both tried this yesterday, and today we both received an email with this error message: "Sorry, we encountered a problem when creating your Google data archive."

Me too. They must have had a surge of takeouts given the recent lock-outs.

Took out my Google data a few times, now amounting 1.4GB never had this issue. Let's hope it's only a temporary slipup.

btw, the data is pretty exhaustive, even for non major Google applications or more recently added features (Maps Location History).

Probably the most useful aspects are that you can run it in batch mode (without supervision), and that you can backup incrementally.

(Note that these aspects may also make the tool a little more dangerous to use.)

I'd like to know, too. On the surface, it would seem that scripting is the main benefit to it, but there might well be other pros/cons.

Very good point. This would make it easier for me to add to a service or cron job to pull periodically.

I just started a takeout session on all my google drive, emails data too.

I wonder how to use them once I have the backup data?

Exactly what you get from Takeout varies from service to service; for email you get an MBOX-format mailbox file (that you can then import into a desktop email client of your choice).

Really? mbox, not maildir? That must be insanely huge.

I pulled mine recently and it was about 3.5GB with ~115k items (chat messages are included). Also pulled my wife's - 217k items @6GB.

Right. So, maildir format then, not mbox.

It is actually mbox. I should have provided more detailed numbers - in my Takeout file, for example, there are 91,360 chat messages and only 23,407 email messages .

So there's 23407 email messages but only one file containing all of them?

Yep! All messages are in a single mbox file and it's 3.2GB.

  cdubz@professor-farnsworth ~/data $ du -h Mail-chris.mbox 
  3.2G	Mail-chris.mbox

Wow. I stand corrected and that's awful. Yet another reason to use gmvault!

Why it awful? As an archive, seems decent.

(1) inconsistent escaping rules (dealing with the literal string \nFrom)

(2) easy to corrupt

Worth noting that Google provides some Python sample code for parsing the file which works great.

Interesting - could you point out where to find this? I poked around a bit but didn't come up with anything.

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