When Google Takeout Fails

By Tom Moertel Posted on August 27, 2025 Tags: google, takeout, backups, data When Google Takeout fails, you’re basically on your own. Here are some quick tips for getting your data when things go wrong. Oh, you tried to download your precious data from a bunch of Google products and days later you got an email with the subject “We couldn’t create a copy of your Google data”? Surely, for something as important as this, Google is going to Respect the User and provide meaningful help and options for moving forward. Joke’s on you. Because what Google actually provides is nothing. Seriously, the email says only that “Something went wrong and we couldn’t create a copy of your Google data. You can try to create a new export.” Well, that’s helpful. What else can we try? It turns out that you can glean some information by going to takeout.google.com/manage and clicking on the failing export to reveal this screen: Which of the 22 products failed? Who the f— knows. Google isn’t saying. What?…