Fitbit

What you'll get

Before you start

1. Work out which account you actually have, because the two routes are completely separate. If you sign in with a Google account, your Fitbit data is in Google Takeout and you need to select Google Health as the product. If you still sign in with the original Fitbit login, it is on Fitbit's own site.
2. Worth knowing that Fitbit's support has moved wholesale into Google's help system, which is a fair indication of how much of this has changed hands.
3. On the native route: Settings, then Data Export, then Request Data under Export Your Account Archive. Leave "Export a selection of your Fitbit data" alone unless you specifically want the 31-day slice.

How to download

1. Request it and confirm by email. On the Takeout route it is the usual Create export flow, just with the product deselected and re-selected so you can be sure Fitbit is in there.
2. Google describes generation as up to a few days for a large account. Plenty of people report exports sitting at 90 per cent for a day or two, which seems to be how it goes rather than a fault.
3. The link arrives by email. Take it promptly, and note what Google says: an export email you did not ask for is a reason to change your password immediately.
4. Unpack it. You get a folder per category (Weight, Steps, Heart rate, Sleep) with a separate JSON file for each day inside.

After the download

• The shape is unfriendly: a folder per category, a file per day. There is no published manifest of what the archive contains, and the layout has changed since the older versions, so any guide describing a single Activities.json or Sleep.json is describing something that no longer ships that way.
• Heart rate arrives in two places: a daily resting figure, and the readings recorded during each activity. There is no continuous 24/7 minute-by-minute series in the export, so the raw stream your tracker recorded is not what you are getting.
• Sleep records are in there. Whether the stage breakdown (light, REM, deep) travels with them is something we could not confirm from an official source, so open the files rather than planning around it.
• You will not get a .fit file. Fitbit does not offer that format, and if you have seen one it came from a third-party converter. Single workouts export from the Google Health app as TCX.
• Google Fit is a one-way sink. Data written into Google Fit does not flow back out into a Fitbit archive, so a Fitbit export is not a way of rescuing anything you pushed there.
• Family accounts get a separate folder per child, which matters if you are after a child's data rather than your own.
• Delete the account first and the data is gone. Google is explicit that data is not available for deleted accounts, so the export happens before, never after.
• If your account migrated to Google, open the archive and check your history is intact before you delete anything anywhere. There are enough reports of gaps appearing after the move to be worth the five minutes.
• Store the archive in ProtonDrive or pCloud for an off-site backup