Google Takeout is a common way to export your data out of your New School Google Workspace, however, it can present several challenges that are difficult to diagnose and fix.

IT Central has no insight into Google Takeout or any of the potential errors you may encounter if using this tool and is unable to assist individuals through this process.

If you encounter issues while using Google Takeout we are providing some tips below that may help you troubleshoot. We cannot guarantee that these tips will work as Google's documentation and logs for Takeout are severely limited preventing us from assisting people further than what is recommended here.

General Tips

  • Sharing and permission settings on files and folders are not maintained
  • If you do not have access to Google Drive, you will not be able to use Google Takeout. Students lose access to Google Drive if they are not active at the university. You can reach out to IT Central to see if you are eligible for a temporary extension to transfer your files out of Google Drive.
  • To successfully transfer data from your New School account to a personal Google account, you must have enough storage space available in your personal account. Go to https://drive.google.com/drive/quota while signed in to your New School account to see how much space you will need. Once you do that, you can either purchase additional storage with a Google One plan with a personal account or you can manually download your data to a hard drive.
  • Export requests can take minutes to hours to days. It is not advisable to make another request for the same application until the previous one has finished successfully or unsuccessfully.
  • It is best to make separate requests for each set of application data (i.e., one request for Gmail, one request for My Drive) and to wait for a request to finish before starting another one.
  • Organize your files into folders and remove any files/emails you no longer need before making your request. This may take time but it has a greater chance of success.
  • It is recommended to use Google's Chrome Browser.
  • Files may not be converted correctly. For example, Forms and Sites get flattened to PDFs.
  • Google does not automatically delete files, folders, or emails that have been successfully exported. 
  • For additional information, see Google's support page

Troubleshooting

Common Cause

More Information

Possible Solution (not guaranteed to resolve your issues)

Network errors or interruptions

Since the Takeout operation occurs on Google's side, it requires a stable, fast connection. Unfortunately, it's possible that the request either drops or is too large and causes an error.

Conduct smaller more frequent Takeout operations.
Archiving limit Google Takeout allows users to only make a certain number of attempts to archive data files. Google Takeout has a limit of two to 3 profiles per day, and a maximum of 7 per week. Space out your requests to not hit this limit.

Limited retries

You can only attempt to download the archive created a limited number of times. If you can't do this in the first 5-6 attempts, the download link will be out of date.

- Make sure you are on a good network connection.

- Don't turn off your computer or let it go to sleep while downloading archives.

- Delete files that you no longer need before attempting to create the archive.

- Create smaller archives that are easier to download. You may find that organizing your files into "export folders" and then exporting the folder will help.

A large amount of data

If you try to export many files, you will sometimes get a "Google Takeout Not Working" error after the whole process.

- Delete files that you no longer need before attempting to create the archive

- Conduct smaller more frequent Takeout operations. You may find that organizing your files into "export folders" and then exporting the folder will help.
Large individual file size Videos, music, etc. will often fail. Especially, but not only, if the file size is larger than the actual export size you set.

- Organize especially large files into their own folder. They may need to be manually downloaded.

- Increase the size of the archive to encapsulate larger file sizes you have. However, there is a 50 GB archive size limit, and this can cause some of the other errors mentioned above.
Permission restrictions You can't use Google Takeout to download files owned by others. The "Shared with me" folders in Google Drive cannot be exported using Google Takeout, even if they contain files that you generate. If others create files in your My Drive, they cannot be exported. Manually download these files (if you have download permission) or request ownership of them.
File type conversions unusable Some file types will export, but will be converted to a PDF (i.e., Forms, Sites) You can try to manually download the file, but even that may be problematic. You may need to recreate the file in a different environment.
Improperly connected Google account Sometimes, if Google Takeout doesn't work, it's a glitch. It may be that the Google server is not properly connected to your account, or it may be that your account login timed out. Log out of your Gmail account and log back in. While this will interrupt any current transfers, it might directly fix the Google Takeout not working issue. You can also circumvent this by using an Incognito or InPrivate browser window to ensure you have a clean slate.
Problematic files It may be that you have a few problematic files that are causing the operation to fail. Organize files into folders. It might be safer to archive a folder than to transfer many individual files. Doing this also allows you to potentially isolate problematic files.