How To Get Your Data Out Of Google Web Apps

January 9th, 2008

GoogleAfter the earlier brouhaha about companies taking hold of our data, I spent some time looking at how to get all my good stuff out of the various Google web applications upon which I have become dependent. Much to Google’s credit, I found each Google App has export options into open formats.

Google Reader

What I want: All my feeds.

How to get it: Click Settings in the upper right corner. Click the Import/Export tab.You find an option to export your subscriptions as an OPML file. This is basically an XML file that you can save to your local computer for safekeeping, or import in another feed reader.

Google Documents

What I want: My documents.

How to get it: Open the document you want to export. Click on File in the upper left corner. In the drop down menu that appears are export options for several file formants: HTML, RTF, Word, OpenOffice, PDF, Text.

GMail

What I want: All my emails.

How to get it: You can access GMail with any standard desktop mail application that supports POP. To set up POP, click Settings in the upper right corner. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab to enable POP and find further configuration instructions for your desktop mail client. I set GMail to keep the messages on the server so I can read them from anywhere. I fire up my desktop mail client a few times a day to copy the emails down to my local computer. I then periodically (once a month) delete all my emails in GMail.

What I want: My GMail contacts.

How to get it: Click Contacts in the left sidebar. Click Export at the bottom of the panel that appears. You have a choice of several file formats, including CSV. CSV is basically a database dump into a text file with the values separated by commas.

Google Analytics

What I want: My website traffic report.

How to get it: Create a custom report. Click the Export tab to save your data in XML and PDF. Click the Email button to email your reports on a regular basis in PDF, CSV, XML, and TSV formats. To get all your past history you can set up one massive report for the entire time span you’ve been using Google Analytics.

Google AdSense

What I want: My earnings report.

How to get it: Create a custom report under Advanced Reports. Click Display Report to generate it, and remember the name. Then under the Reports tab, visit the Report Manager page. Set a report frequency (daily, weekly or monthly), and you can then add an email address to send the report to on a regular basis. The format choices are CSV or CSV Excel.

Get Edjumacated on these data formats:

Conclusion

After doing this research, I was reassured that I could get my data out of Google in a format for backups or use by another application.

My research isn’t to say I’m going to stop using Google any time soon. Rather, I found the portability of the data yet another reason to use Google services as they respect my desire to retain ownership over my data. Go Google.

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  • JC
    You can also set up just about any email program to get IMAP GMail too, now. They quietly added that option a while ago. Makes my life a lot easier, since I check on both my laptop and my iPhone.

    Note: On the iPhone, you have to set it up as a generic IMAP account, not a Google account, since the Google presets are set to POP only. (At the time of iPhone's release, POP was the only option.) A future iPhone firmware update should fix that problem.
  • Good tip abut IMAP - I obviously haven't checked that out.

    An iPhone - I still have to get me one of those :)
  • Slammerworm
    I've no idea who the above poster is. You'd think there would be more than enough cool pseudonyms to go around.
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