San Francisco — Relentlessly striving to spruce up its services, search engine titan Google has again taken a step further by empowering users the choice to export the data and save it locally on their computers. Google Takeout is a service by Google that now offers extended support for those of you with a Blogger account and/or a Google+ page account to save some of their data to a local system.
In a post on its Data Liberation blog, the search engine company has added the ability to download Blogger blogs and Google+ pages to its Takeout data portability tool, users can now download an entire archive — or just a single blog or page of choice using Google Takeout.
However, the Takeout feature is provided by The Data Liberation Front, which is a special Google engineering team responsible for letting users transport their data into and out of Google’s diverse product lines.
For those of you who are not familiar, the Google Takeout service is an impressive service that makes available data from a variety of Google services including Google Drive, YouTube (the videos uploaded), Contacts, Picasa Web Albums or Google Reader. This will allow users of these products to get a structured download of their data in a couple of widely accepted formats.
This is a really nice addition for those users out there who want to export/backup their blogs from Blogger. Once you are on the official Takeout page you can either select to download the full archive from all services made available here, or make a selection of services that you want to export data from.
More so, prior to this, Google Takeout was only offering its services for personal Google+ accounts. But following the introduction of this extended support, even those who have a Google+ page set-up for your business, or websites, can export the data from those as well.
The new Blogger support allows you to export data from your entire Blogger account, or you can choose to export only a single page or blog. In addition, the data will be exported as an Atom XML files which you can load locally into an application supporting the format or into another web application if the format is supported.
Besides, all blogs that you possess on Blogger will be included in the download, each in its own Atom.xml file. What you can do with the data? You can for instance transform the XML into XHTML using XLST. Also, the blog archive is delivered as a zip file that you can download to your computer after entering your password again. Note that it may take some time to generate the archive, and that you will be notified by email when it is available for download.
Interestingly, it does not end just here. According to the blog post: “If you have enjoyed exporting data from your Google+ Stream and Google+ Circles through Takeout in the past, but are looking for something more, join us now and download HTML files with your posts and JSON files containing the circles for each Google+ Page you own,” wrote the Data Liberation Front in a blog post.
Now, the Google+ Pages export option is the third option covering Google’s social networking service Google+. Your Google+ pages will be exported as HTML files containing your posts and JSON files containing the circles on your page. The download includes data from all pages automatically. When you extract the archive you end up with a folder for each page, and in that folder two sub-folders that lead to activities and circles. Activities includes all posts made on that page in single HTML files while circles include customer, following team member and vip JSON files.
As a matter of fact, a couple of other essential services are still missing from Takeout, with the most prominent one being Gmail. While you can export all Gmail email messages using excellent third party software like Thunderbird or Mailstore Home, some users may prefer a first party backup solution instead.
Anyways, just visit Google Takeout and take advantage of this new addition of tools for now. Even if you do not normally believe in exporting stuff, it is better to do so, at least just for the sake of record.