Updated Sep 28, 2026
Google Takeout is the largest data export any company offers, covering upwards of 80 categories, most of which nobody realises exist until they see the list. Assistant recordings, original-quality Photos, Chrome history and bookmarks, Maps saved places, Search history, YouTube activity and more, each in its own archive on its own timescale. There is no single download, and the finished thing is measured in gigabytes. It is also the only export here that is genuinely complete.
What you'll get
Before you start
- Go to takeout.google.com and sign in with the Google account you want.
- Click Deselect all, then pick your categories deliberately. Everything is selected by default and that default is enormous.
- If you want photos, know that Takeout delivers them at original quality and that is the main reason exports get huge. Your existing Google Photos download is already compressed, so consider whether you need this copy at all.
- If you have a YouTube account, decide whether you want the watch history. It is one of the largest text exports and one of the least read.
How to download
- Scroll down to Export your data and click Next step.
- Choose Single file if you want one thing to keep. Choose Multiple files if you ticked a lot and the total is big, because it streams rather than building one enormous archive.
- Choose the export format. HTML opens the readable files straight in a browser. ZIP gives you a tidy folder to keep. Most people want ZIP.
- Set the frequency to Export once, unless you genuinely want this on a schedule.
- Click Create export. Google emails a download link, usually within minutes, sometimes within hours for a large request.
Pro tip
The mistake people make is selecting everything and then abandoning the export when it turns out to be several hundred gigabytes. Select the categories you would actually open again, run that first, and add more later if you want. A completed small archive beats an abandoned large one.
Recommended backup tools
- Amazon SSD — 2TB SSD for a local encrypted backup. Takeout archives with Photos and Drive in them are enormous.
- ProtonDrive — End-to-end encrypted cloud vault for the most sensitive Takeout files
- pCloud — Lifetime storage option for the multi-year archive
After the download
- Open Voice and Audio activity. Assistant recordings can go back years and include conversations that happened near your devices, which is occasionally alarming to read.
- Location History comes through as structured JSON rather than something you can read. Google Maps Timeline is the viewer for it, and it puts the raw file back into a map you can actually look at.
- Once you have the archive downloaded, delete it from Google's servers from the same page. Takeout exports are stored on Google's side for a limited period and it is not a place to leave a full copy of your data.
- The archive is worth splitting across two places rather than one. An external SSD for the bulk, an encrypted cloud vault for the parts you would not want leaking: search history, location, voice recordings.