Google Launches Takeout Service

June 30th, 2011 by Leslie Meredith, TechNewsDaily

Spoofing grim-faced guerrillas, Google’s own Data Liberation Front today launched Google Takeout, a service designed to make it easy to create backup copies of your Google data across all Google services.

Initially, Takeout includes Buzz, Picasa, Profile, Contacts and Circles and Stream, but Google plans to provide the same zipped file exporting for its other products such as Documents, Gmail and Groups.

Takeout uses open file formats to export multiple files, so you can use the data with other services as well as store a backup on your computer or on another cloud service.

You can choose to grab a copy of all data that Google has stored for you in the four available services, which you can download in a single zipped file, or choose one service at a time.

For instance, if you were one of the few who lost their Gmail contacts back in February, you know first-hand the value of backing up. Takeout makes it much easier: Contacts and Circles are saved as .vcf files known as vCard files for storing contact information including names, addresses and phone numbers. It’s an open format that works with both Windows and Mac OSX programs.

While it may seem as though Google is encouraging users to take their business elsewhere, the DLF members say that they don’t want you to transfer your data away from Google, rather it’s important that you know you can.

For a quick way to see Google products at work, try Google’s new search ‘What Do You Love?’ that offers up results from YouTube, Trends, 3-D Sketch, Images, Patents and more along with one-click ways to share your favorites.

This article was provided by TechNewsDaily.