How to ensure Google won't delete your life's work

On Thursday, I wrote about the disappearance of artist Dennis Cooper’s blog, and along with it, 14 years of his work. The blog was on Google-owned Blogger, and in late June, Google took it down without warning or explanation and revoked Cooper’s access to the email address associated with it.

Cooper isn’t the only one this has happened to. On Facebook and on Twitter, people have been sharing similar tales of woe about losing blogs and email accounts after opaque decisions made by Google and/or its constituent services. Few have lost quite so much un-backed up work as Cooper, but he’s still not alone.

So, in the interest of public service, a reminder: You can download all the information from your Google account to your computer. Google has a service called Takeout, that lets you save anything associated with your Google account. Hangouts, email, contacts, saved map locations, photos, whatever you want, including any Blogger blogs associated with the Google account you’re using.

Go to https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout and then choose what you want:

If you only want the Blogger files, you can tweak Takeout so you just get those, or you can download them directly from Blogger.

Once you choose what you want, hit next and choose how you want your archive (say, as a .zip file) and where you want it to go (sent to your email address or saved to a drive). If you send to an email address, make sure to save it to your own computer or drive; otherwise you could run into the same problem later, should you lose control of that email address.

Take a minute, do it right now, because if all your stuff is only ~in the cloud~, it’s not really backed up.

Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]