What is Google Takeout?
The Google Takeout service allows you to export and download your data from the Google products you use, like your email, calendar, and photos. In a few easy steps, create an archive to keep for your records or use the data in another service.
In short, it creates a copy of your data … which you can do anything you’d like with. Google Takeout is a free service available to any type of Google Account. For security reasons, it can be disabled by G Suite Administrators.
Using Google Takeout to migrate data?
No. Don’t do it. In short, this is not what Google Takeout is for … there are several critical shortcomings.
- Takeout is only a snapshot in time … you do not capture any changes to the source account after the download. During a migration, you want employees to continue working without any disruptions.
- Takeout converts Google file formats into other locally available formats – Gmail data becomes a PST or MBOX file, Google Docs become Word, Google Sheets become Excel.
- All metadata is lost – a brand new copy of the data is created. You lose original creation date information, last modified information, sharing information, etc.
- Importing data back into G Suite accounts or other services is extremely manual in nature as each type of content for each individual User must be migrated individually.
- Given the time of downloading content and the time required to import content, you’ll have a big hole in your data and/or completely unnecessary downtime
How should you migrate?
There are many dedicated migration services depending on your objectives, sources and destinations, data size, etc. G Suite Enterprise, Business, Standard, Education and Nonprofit all have additional API capabilities that enable extremely smooth transitions to and from the G Suite platform. Google Takeout is intended to be used by individual consumers with relatively straightforward requirements to download a copy of their data.
