A Little Google Takeout (Premium)

Thanks to my transition from Google Play Music to YouTube Music, Google reminded me of a feature called Takeout that needs more attention. This is Google’s system for allowing users of its products to download, backup, and reuse the data that the firm has collected and, in some cases, delete it.

According to the Google Takeout website, the service lets you “export a copy of [the] content in your Google Account to back it up or use it with a service outside of Google.” And the amount of data it has—at least in my case—is a bit astonishing. Given how long it took me to download my Google Play Music data—more on that below—I strongly recommend not sticking with the default, which is to download everything. But it’s certainly worth examining the list.

Among the data I can download is data related to my Google Calendar schedule, my Chrome bookmarks, history, and settings, my contacts, files I’ve stored in Drive, my Google Fit activity, my Google Fi phone number and voice mails, and much, much more.

But I was there just for the music. The email I received from Google notes that Google Play Music will shut down between October and December this year. And that because I’d already transferred to YouTube Music, the firm wanted to inform me of some differences in the services and what I could expect going forward. One of the bullet items in this email noted the following:

Google Play Music library and data. In addition to transferring your library to YouTube Music, you have the option to download any music that you’ve purchased or uploaded to Google Play Music, as well as a list of the tracks, playlists, and radio stations in your library. We’ll notify you before you’ll lose access to your Google Play Music library and data. You can also delete your Google Play Music data.

Interesting.

From what I can tell, my transition to YouTube Music had proceeded without any issues. To my knowledge, all of my playlists, songs, albums, likes, and so on had made their way to the new service. But I was curious to see what it would look like to download my purchased and uploaded music, and to back that up to my NAS. As I’ve often written, one of the things that I like(d) about Google Play Music was that you could easily mix and match your own music with music from the subscription library. And I had this rough idea that I’d probably uploaded a few dozen songs at least.

The “download” link above brings you to the Google Takeout website after you sign-in to your account, and as noted it’s a bit dense. But there is one entry for Google Play Music, which notes that the available data includes “a list of the tracks, playlists, radio stations, uploads, and purchases in your Google Play Music library, as well as your playback and search history.” And the more info link adds, “To keep your music, either transfer it to YouTube Music or download it. If you choose not to do either, we’ll let you know before we automatically delete all of your music and data, including history.”

All I wanted was my uploaded and purchased music, but there’s no way to choose only that. Instead, I would get all of that data in the following formats: Playlists, radio stations, and track metadata would arrive in CSV (comma separated values) format, and the music files themselves would be in MP3 format.

So I unselected everything and selected the Google Play Music entry. When I continued through the wizard, I was told that the size of this download would require separating it into 25 files, each of which would be up to 2 GB in size. This was larger than I expected, much larger. But I went ahead with it. This was about 3:20 pm on Monday.

Google told me that it would inform me via email when the download was ready. I went about my business and basically forgot about it. But when I woke up this morning, I saw that Google had emailed me around midnight to tell me that I was good to download the data.

Downloading those 25 files was tedious and time-consuming. In fact, it took a good chunk of the morning with a lot of babysitting. But when it was done, I found a set of folders for Playlists and Tracks. And the Tracks folder had both CSV and MP3 files, the latter of which were not sorted into folders in any way. I deleted everything that was not an MP3 file and was left with 6,173 files.

6,173!

This was approximately 6,000 more files than I had originally expected, though the size of the full download was a clue that it was going to be big; just the MP3 files amount to about 48.5 GB of data. And I do recognize all of the music, of course. I must have uploaded most of it at some point, for some reason, perhaps as part of an automated move to Google Play Music in the past. I don’t remember. But I’ll back it up to the NAS.

But my more general advice here is that anyone with a Google account—and that’s pretty much all of us—should at least examine what’s there in Google Takeout and consider backing up whatever is relevant to you offline. This data can also be helpful if you drop one or more Google services and/or are trying to limit your exposure to Google, of course. Anyway, take a moment and take a look. You might be as surprised as I was.