[chongli]

Friendly reminder that Google Takeout [1] exists. When I read a story a few years ago about a guy who had his primary Google account banned with no recourse (for reselling Pixel phones) and permanently lost 20 years worth of emails and family photos, I researched and found Takeout and used it to back up all my data, then subsequently stopped using Google services altogether (apart from YouTube).

[1] https://takeout.google.com/

[teshigahara]

Unfortunately the service is very buggy in my experience. When I tried to download all of my photos data multiple times it gave me corrupted .zip files and half of the files were just zero bytes. Maybe I can blame Firefox for that though, I dunno. I should probably try again with Chrome before completely blaming Google

[zythyx]

I've never had a problem with Google Takeout the multiple times I've used it. Perhaps try making the compressed files smaller (You can choose to make them 1gb or greater, last time I used it), you might need to download 75 files, but it's better than 1 big file.

[stevage]

That doesn't solve all issues, such as services you have signed up to using your Gmail account.

[layer8]

Services generally allow changing your email address. Otherwise, it’s one more reason to use your own email domain.

[cube00]

It's called lock in for a reason.

It's supposed to be hard to leave.

I'm just grateful they at least have takeout.

[PacificSpecific]

Thank you for this. I had no idea this existed.