When Google Takeout fails, you’re basically on your own. Here are some quick tips for getting your data when things go wrong.
Oh, you tried to download your precious data from a bunch of Google products and days later you got an email with the subject “We couldn’t create a copy of your Google data”? Surely, for something as important as this, Google is going to Respect the User and provide meaningful help and options for moving forward.
Joke’s on you. Because what Google actually provides is nothing. Seriously, the email says only that “Something went wrong and we couldn’t create a copy of your Google data. You can try to create a new export.”
Well, that’s helpful.
What else can we try? It turns out that you can glean some information by going to takeout.google.com/manage and clicking on the failing export to reveal this screen:
Which of the 22 products failed? Who the f— knows. Google isn’t saying.
What? Did you think that clicking on the “22 products” link would tell you something useful about the failure? Nope. It just lists all 22 products that were in the failed attempt. What about the “Learn more” link? It just takes you to the generic help for Takeout failures, which again boils down to “try again.”
If you want to figure out which products you can’t get your data from, you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way: Binary Search.
I know, I know. It’s absolutely, mind bogglingly absurd that you should have to waste days making repeated Takeout attempts to identify what products are failing you. All because Google’s leadership doesn’t prioritize Takeout—or users—enough to make sure that Takeout actually works reliably.
Fortunately, there is a trick to make the binary search slightly easier. If you click the red “Start new request” button on this particular error screen, the UI for starting a new request will be limited to just the products that you tried to include in the failed attempt. (As far as I can tell, this semi-helpful feature is completely undocumented.) That means you can run the binary search as follows:
- When a Takeout request fails, go to takeout.google.com/manage, find the failed attempt, and click on it. You will see a screen like the one above.
- Now, right click the “Start new request” button and select “Open Link in New Tab” in your web browser. In that new tab, configure a new Takeout request but, crucially, uncheck all but the first half of the listed products. Submit the request and close the tab.
- That will take you back to the previous tab. Click the “Start new request” button again. This time, uncheck all but the second half of the listed products. Submit the request.
- Now wait. Hours. Maybe days.
- If all the Takeout requests succeed, great, you’re done.
- Otherwise, for each failing attempt, go back to Step 1 and split that failed attempt into two half-sized attempts by repeating the procedure above.
- Eventually, you will narrow the failures down to the individual products that you can’t get your data from. For these products, you can try changing the Takeout settings (if offered) or try to escalate to someone you know within Google who might help. If you’re famous, you can try the Twitter route.
Good luck!