Getting your Own Data out of Google Servers – How Easy is that ?

I was looking at the export options available in various Google services that would let me save data out of Google data centers on to the local hard drive and here’s a quick summary of how things stand so far:

While most Google tools allow you to walk away with your own data, the process is not always as simple as you would like it to be.

Blogger and Google Photos (Picasa Web Albums) get the maximum points as both these services make it extremely easy for users to download their own content locally.

You can export any Blogger blog in a text file while the desktop client of Picasa can pull down all your photo albums in a click. Flickr has no download tools yet.

With Gmail, you can backup email messages locally via POP or IMAP but this requires you to have a mail software on the desktop and the process can be a bit tricky for non-techies. Yahoo! Mail offers no such option for free users while Hotmail users can download emails on the desktop through Windows Live Mail.

Now Facebook is often criticized for holding users data but Orkut, Google’s own social networking platform, is not any different.

The only data you can export out of Orkut is a CSV list of your Orkut friends’ email addresses and that’s it. Orkut exposes no RSS feeds and unlike Facebook, there’s no option to download birthdays, contact photos, phone numbers, etc. out of Orkut. The same holds true for your scrapbook and email messages.

In case of Google Docs, you can save a local copy of documents one-by-one manually but you won’t find something like an "Export All" button. There’s a workaround using Greasemonkey but most Google Docs users looking to backup files onto a CD would want something simple.

There are a million ways to download videos from YouTube but you never get access to clips in their original format. Therefore you always need to keep a local copy of original video files even after uploading them onto YouTube (or use blip.tv for backup).

This may come as a surprise but you can only export a maximum of 500 records from any Google Analytics report at a time. So  if you have large and popular website with few thousand pages, taking Analytics data offline can be time consuming and very confusing as well.