Google abandoned Google at the end of last year, its social network. Now, before Google starts deleting Google+ posts and communities, you have until April 2. It’s not a big deal for most people, but it’s a sad time for those of us who loved Google+. But at least before the clock strikes midnight, you can save some of your information.
It’s not just your posts and communities that will disappear into the big bitbucket in the sky, according to Google. Your photos and videos from Google+ will also be removed. If you have Google Photo backed up your photos and videos, they will be safe.
Google won’t immediately remove everything. Google will take a couple of months to delete all content from Google+ accounts, Google+ pages, and album archives for consumers. Don’t expect it. The intelligent thing to do is get your data out before it vanishes. This is how you do it.
How to save data from your Google + account?
First, go to Google Takeout. This website shows all your products from Google. I bet you haven’t even known how many you used. I had more than 50 myself. You can create an archive of all your data from here by default. Since you don’t want to do that, hit Select None. Then go to the Google+ list.
Decide What Data to Retain?
You’ll see there’s not one listing for Google+. There are five separate ones instead. Google+ + 1s can be ignored on websites. That’s just your+ 1 advice on other websites. Google + Circles (your contacts), Google + Community (your community data), Google + Stream (your posts) and Profile (your profile data) are what you want.
These data are available in several formats. You can get your contact information about Circle in CSV, HTML at the top. Or JSON, vCard.
You can get your data in HTML or JSON for communities. You can theoretically obtain your data from all the communities in which you have been active or select data from certain communities. I found that you can only download data from all your communities in practice.
You can choose to receive your data in HTML or JSON with Google + Stream. You can really select the data you want to keep here. A choice of posts, activity logs, metadata and events is given to you. Of these, I think the posts you’ll want to keep are likely. Your profile data can only be found in JSON.
Once you have selected what you want, go to the bottom of the page and click the button Next. Now you’ll have a choice in which compressed format you want your archives: zip or tgz. You can also select the archive file size. This varies between 1 GB and 50 GB. If you have more data, multiple archives are available.
Once this is done, you can send an email to the download link or place the archive directly in your Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, or Box. This may take some time, depending on how much data you have. Google warns that getting your archive takes hours or even days.
It’s up to me. I spent many hours talking to my readers on Google+ and chatting with open-source software and Linux movers and shakers, including Linus Torvalds. The effort is well worth it.
