Google Takeout – How to take Gmail Backup
Google lets you download all your data into an MOBX file. This is an extremely useful feature for many users. You can choose the type of data you want to export to a file and then download it.
Here’s how you can download this MBOX file from Google account, if you haven’t done it already.
How to Download Google Takeout MBOX file From Google Account
Skip this section if you already have MBOX file downloaded from Google, and directly go to the next section on how to convert MBOX to PST using ‘Mail Extractor Pro”.
If not, follow the instructions below.
- Go to this link – https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout, and Sign in to your Google account using your credentials.
- You can select data that you want to include in the takeout file. Note that this is not just for emails in Gmail account, but also includes data from other Google services. Such as: Google plus, Blogger, bookmarks, Calendar, Chrome, contacts, drive, etc.
- Inside each category of Google services, there would be further options to select. Such as, inside Gmail, you can choose whether you want the entire email database or some particular folders.
- Choose the file type: .zip, .tgz, or .tbz. This file refers to the entire database that you have selected in the steps above in a compressed folder format. Inside this compressed folder will be particular files referring to the Google services you selected to download. For example, your bookmarks will be archived to HTML file, and emails will be archived to MBOX file (which is what our concern is for this article).
- Choose the archive size. Archives larger than this size will be split into multiple files. If your internet is slow, make this size small so you don’t have to download an overly large file.
- The last option is to choose the delivery method for this archived file: you can choose to get the download link via email, or automatically get the file uploaded to your Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.
- Click ‘Create Archive’
- Google takes some time to create the downloadable files for you by working in background in its own servers. That means you don’t have to keep the page open. Google will notify you when the archiving process is done.
- Finally, after you get the notification, download the compressed folder (.zip, .tgz, or .tbz).
- Extract the folder on to your computer. You will see an MBOX file within that, which is what we need in the steps that follow below.
This particular service by Google is one of the primary products featured by the specialized team at Google called “Google Data Liberation Front.” It was first released in June 28 2011. The primary objective was to make it easier for the users to move their data in and out of Google products. This is particularly helpful if a user decides to stop using Google services. Using “Google Takeout,” one can easily extract everything they ever stored in their Google account in standard data file formats like MBOX for emails, HTML for bookmarks, and so on.
For Gmail, downloading an archived MBOX file with all the email inside isn’t particularly helpful for Windows Outlook users. That is why USL Software released a product called “Mail Extractor Pro” that can help them convert this MBOX file to PST with least efforts. It’s an easy to use tool with intuitive interface and delivers sharper precision over the fidelity of your contents than any other MBOX to PST converter out there.
The above steps helps you to take backup your GMail Mailbox (MBOX Archive) and you can convert the exported MBOX file into PST file format using Mail Extractor Pro