About Digital Takeout Day
Digital Takeout Day is made by Charles Leerink. It is a twice-yearly reminder, on May 8 and November 8, to download and back up the data you have built up across the services you use.
More from Charles: leerink.me
Why this exists
Your photos, messages, activity history, and account records should not exist only inside someone else's product. This site makes the export process less opaque, and helps you keep a copy you can actually use.
How these guides are written
Every step on this site is checked against the platform's own documentation, not against other guides. That sounds obvious and it is rarer than it should be. Most export instructions online are written once and never checked again, which is how pages end up confidently telling people to click a button that moved two years ago.
Where a platform publishes its own documentation, that is linked at the foot of the guide so you can read the original and judge it yourself. We would rather point you at the source than be the only copy.
Some screenshots here come from vendor support pages, credited and linked back. Anything we did not produce ourselves says so.
When a platform does not say
Some companies publish no file manifest at all. Strava documents how to request its archive and then stops, without saying what is inside. Deezer does not state the format anywhere in writing. Where that is the case, the guide says so plainly rather than filling the gap with a list copied from somebody else's export.
You will also find places here where the honest answer is that nobody knows. Those are marked as such. A page that admits a gap is more useful than one that fills it with something confident and wrong.
Corrections
Platform exports change, and guides on this site will fall out of date. When one does, it gets corrected rather than quietly reworded, and the date on the guide changes with it.
If a step does not match what you see, email info@takeoutday.org with the guide URL and a note or a screenshot. Reports of steps that have moved are genuinely useful and get acted on.
What this site does not do
There are no comments, no accounts, and no newsletter. There is no tool that takes your data and does something with it. The aim is a page you can read once, act on, and close.
Affiliate disclosure
Some storage links are affiliate links, in the sections about what to do with a download once you have it. They never affect which tools are recommended, and a free or non-affiliate alternative is included where it makes sense.
Tools for reading your own files, such as JSON viewers, are deliberately not monetised. People are already wary of being sold something in the middle of a guide about reading their own data, and they are right to be.
When the guides get reviewed
Every guide on the site is re-checked twice a year, around May 8 and November 8. That is slow on purpose. These platforms do not change often, and a site that updates its review dates constantly is not reviewing anything, it is just generating dates.