The rest here is my personal feeling. It might be wrong. I might have missed something.
... only when trying to use it it is dark patterns in layers to prevent you from actually using it:
- getting links to download stuff takes more than enough time to get you to forget it.
- and they only last for a very limited time
- archives are unwieldy
Building takeout archives is incredibly expensive for Google. Do that just a few times and you might have wiped out years of profit Google made off you. Thats because most data in your Google account (eg. a random email or a photo you took in 2013) is only accessed once and then never again. Storage systems are designed for that. Yet when you go and try and access every single piece of data ever, you're putting more load on their storage systems than years of regular use.
Thats part of why it takes so long to build the archive - they do it at low priority and slowly so as not to overload the service for other users.
Still: why make it so hard to get the archives once they are generated?
Giving you 7 days to download it seems fine... Remember they are effectively giving you double storage capacity for those 7 days, and hundreds of gigabytes of network egress (which would cost $8 or so if I paid GCP network costs each time I takeout my account).
I still dislike Google intensely for a number of things but not for this anymore.
(In case you are interested:
- serving me insulting ads and not giving me good ones whenever I didn't have adblock activated for over a decade. (edit: I've lost count of how many times I've clicked "not interested" on semi nude pictures advertising for scammy dating sites)
- causing me hours and hours and hours of frustration by breaking doublequotes
- killing Google+
- keeping me worried that they will shut me down until I can migrate my last account off Google and a few weeks
- almost killing Firefox
- and the open web
- scheming to make adblockers impossible
- probably more)
(I googled it but couldn’t find it, haha)
See if any of the top three or ten results contains the word "goolge" or if they have silently rewritten it in the background.
Adding doublequotes used to mean it should search for that exact phrase. Super simple example of one place were it was useful: when you were troubleshooting a weird crash and you saw a mis-spelling in an error message: you copy or type in that exact message in quotes, bam, if there was a match you got it.
Google is always doing lots of experiments on all of us, vut for the last decade this has been broken for me. It just ignores the doublequotes. Same with the verbatim setting, it has been just placebo.
The top three did contain "goolge"...
I was able to schedule it to do backups every 2 months for 1 year, and upload the backups directly to my Dropbox account.
If it works as advertised, I'm pretty happy with that!
Also, you know have the option to have downloads prepared for you automatically at periodic intervals.