How to Download Everything From Your Google Account

Google Takeout exports your data out of Google in open formats. It is the right tool for leaving a service, keeping an independent archive, or satisfying yourself that your photos exist somewhere other than one company’s servers.

It is also slow, produces enormous files, and has a seven-day window on the download links. Most people’s first attempt fails for one of those reasons, so the configuration matters more than the clicking.

One thing it is not: a way to free up storage. Takeout copies, it does not move. If your 15GB is full, exporting first and deleting afterwards is a sensible sequence, but the export alone changes nothing.

Start by deselecting everything

Go to takeout.google.com.

The page opens with every product selected, which is the single worst setting for getting a usable export. Click Deselect all at the top, then tick only what you actually want.

The reason is time. A full export of every Google product on a long-standing account can take days to prepare and produce an archive you then have to download. Three targeted exports of one service each finish faster than one export of everything and are far easier to handle.

Which services are worth exporting

Contacts and Calendar together export in seconds and are the highest value per minute of anyone’s attention. Photos and Mail are the ones that take days.

Get the per-service settings right

Each selected product has an All data included or Multiple formats button worth clicking before you continue.

Google Photos lets you choose specific albums rather than the whole library. On a large account, exporting one year or a handful of albums is dramatically faster than everything.

Drive lets you choose how Docs, Sheets and Slides are converted, since they have no native file form. .docx, .xlsx and .pptx are the practical choices; PDF is better only if you need fixed layout and never want to edit them again.

Mail lets you export specific labels instead of everything. If you only need one project’s correspondence, this turns a multi-day job into a short one.

The delivery settings that decide whether this works

After picking services, click Next step. This screen is where most failures originate.

Transfer to: Send download link via email is the default and the one to use. The alternatives deposit the archive into Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box — and sending it to Google Drive is a trap, because it lands in the same 15GB you are probably trying to understand.

Frequency: Export once, unless you genuinely want a scheduled export every two months for a year.

File type: .zip opens natively on Windows and macOS. .tgz is smaller but needs separate software on Windows.

File size: 2GB. This is the most important setting on the page. Larger options exist up to 50GB, and a 50GB download that fails at 80% starts over from nothing. A 2GB chunk that fails costs you one chunk. You get more files; you also get a download that finishes.

Click Create export.

Then wait, properly

Google emails you when the archive is ready. A small export might be an hour; a full Photos and Gmail export on a long-lived account commonly runs to several days.

Do not re-request it because nothing happened overnight. Duplicate requests queue behind each other and make everything slower.

When the email arrives, you have seven days to download. Download immediately, to a drive with room for all of it, and do not treat the link as storage.

Opening what you get

Photos arrive as the original files in folders by year and album, each with a .json sidecar holding the date taken, description and album membership. Most photo managers ignore the JSON, which means dates can appear as the export date rather than the capture date when you import them elsewhere. The files themselves are untouched originals.

Gmail arrives as a single .mbox file. Thunderbird imports it directly; Apple Mail and Outlook need a conversion step. Opening MBOX is the part people underestimate — it is a standard format but not a convenient one.

Drive arrives as your file tree with Google-native documents converted to whatever you chose.

If the download keeps failing

• Check the file size setting. If you used 50GB, request again with 2GB. This fixes most cases on its own.
• Use a wired connection or at least stay close to the router for a multi-gigabyte download.
• Download chunks one at a time. Parallel downloads of a dozen 2GB files compete for the same bandwidth and fail more often.
• Check your disk space first. A zip archive needs room for itself and then room again for the extracted contents.

What Takeout does not solve

It is not a backup in any ongoing sense. It is a snapshot of a moment, going stale immediately. Treating a Takeout archive as your backup strategy means your backup is as old as the day you ran it.

It does not free storage. Everything exported remains in your account. If space is the problem, the export is step one and deletion is step two — the order to delete in is covered in what to delete first when Gmail is full and in working out which service is using your 15GB.

It does not include everything. Some products export partial data, and anything shared with you that you do not own is not yours to export.

Realistic outcomes

A targeted export — Contacts, Calendar and one year of Photos — completes within a few hours and downloads without incident. That is the version of Takeout that works well, and it is the one most people actually need.

A full-account export is a multi-day operation producing tens of gigabytes across dozens of files, with a seven-day window to collect it. It is entirely doable, but plan the disk space and the evening before you start it rather than discovering both at the point the email arrives.