Download your data

Deciding what format you should choose depends on the service, type of data, and your intended use of it. We have chosen types that we believe are the most useful and portable, for example, we export contacts as vCard, which is a very common format for e-mail providers. We often will also provide additional options to fit your specific needs.

You can store your data anywhere that is safe and has enough room for it. In most cases, it is easiest to download it directly to your computer.

If you use a public computer, please store it in Google Drive or an alternate storage space where you are the only user.

Note: If you use Google Drive, and plan on deleting your Google Account, you’ll have to move your archive to a different storage space before deleting your account.

In order to make sure your data will be downloaded, we limit these zip files to 2GB. Archives that are larger than 2GB are split into multiple zip files. Selecting the tgz or tbz format for your archive will increase the size limit to 50GB, so it is much less likely that your archive will be split.

Note: Special software may be required to unpack a tgz or tbz archive. Keep in mind that these types of files can’t have unicode characters in the file names.

Your archive expires in about 7 days. After that time, you’ll want to create a new archive with your most up-to-date information.

An expired archive doesn’t mean your data has expired, and you won't experience any change in Google services as a result.

Note: We only allow each archive to be downloaded 5 times; after that, please request another archive.

The security of your data is very important, so when you create an archive, we want to make sure that you're the only person downloading your data.

To do that, we ask you to re-enter your Google Account password if you haven't recently. We understand that this may be inconvenient, but it's important to take extra steps to keep your data safe.

Note: If you have 2-step verification turned on for on your account, you may also be asked for an additional verification code that will be sent to your phone.

Please try creating another archive—this will fix the problem in the majority of cases.

When you export your mail from Gmail, each message's labels are preserved in a special X-Gmail-Labels header in your download file. While no mail client recognizes this header now, most mail clients allow for extensions to be written that could make use of the labels.

See Migrate data away from Google Apps for options on how to migrate your organization's email, calendars, documents, and sites.