I’ve tried a google takeout. My activity has been light and only maybe the last 18 months so not a lot to backup.
I’ve tried a google takeout. My activity has been light and only maybe the last 18 months so not a lot to backup.
I’m not a blogger and have no website to restore to so i went with html format. I can see all the text of posts made and comment threads but saved collections and so on all seem to end up with links back to plus.google.xxxx addresses. My understanding is that’ll disappear or become inaccessible when g+ closes.
Is this correct?
Do i have to save images manually?
Or do i have to use json format and maybe also the other 3rd party tool? In which case how do i look at the content inside a json file?
I thought I understood things better but obviously not. Rather confused at present.
I’m not a blogger and have no website to restore to so i went with html format. I can see all the text of posts made and comment threads but saved collections and so on all seem to end up with links back to plus.google.xxxx addresses. My understanding is that’ll disappear or become inaccessible when g+ closes.
Is this correct?
Do i have to save images manually?
Or do i have to use json format and maybe also the other 3rd party tool? In which case how do i look at the content inside a json file?
I thought I understood things better but obviously not. Rather confused at present.
Your Collections and Communities items for Google Data Takeout only contain what's called 'metadata'. They contain information about Collections and Communities¹, such as their names, visibility and possibly links to posts, but not the actual posts.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the posts located in Google+ Stream/Posts/*.(json,html) will include all your posts, including those you've posted to a Collection or Community. Unfortunately you'll have to use the metadata inside those files to figure out which of them belong to which Collection/Community. If you've exported your content as JSON, this information will be located in postAcl->collectionAcl->collection->displayName inside the Google+ Stream/Posts/201901031 - Title of the post.json file.
It's a shame Google didn't split out all those Posts files into sub-folders based on Collections/collection-name, Communities/community-name, Public/, Private/circles and Private/individuals.
If you're familiar with the command line interface, you can use the jq tool and the jq library I've included in https://github.com/FiXato/Plexodus-Tools repository to filter your json files based on collection and other criteria. Alternatively you could use the tools and instructions Bernhard Suter has provided through his blog https://blog.kugelfish.com
Again, this relies on having used the JSON export format.
github.com - FiXato/Plexodus-Tools
Oh, I forgot to include the footnote ¹:
ReplyDeleteWhile Communities currently still contain just metadata, they are supposed to contain their posts as well once Google adds that feature early March. (According to today's announcement/FAQ)
Thanks mate. Am now much less confused. Not much of a command line person any more. I’ll take a few more backups plus save manually the stuff i care most about. I only probably need to save about 20-30 pictures and the associated details. My entire backup was 15 mb. So not a lot. But I’ll try again in march to see what happens. Thanks again.
ReplyDeleteThe Google Plus Exporter by Friends+Me is perhaps also worth a look for you then. See the list of links in this community's description for a direct link to the project, or follow F+M's account
ReplyDeleteAlistair Langsford For light personal use, you may find a GDT HTML archive sufficient. I'd still recommend doing, if you care for the data:
ReplyDelete1. Another GDT (Google Data Takeout) requesting JSON formats for all significant data (Google+ Streams most especially). You win tremendously on flexibility, including use of third-party tools to process or import the archive elsewhere later.
2. Use the Friends+Me Google+ Exporter. That's an exceptionally versatile and powerful tool. It will definitely allow you to grab content GDT won't (communities you're not an owner/moderator of, non-public communities), though it may miss some content as well (partial comments to posts, possibly only a subset of posts for a community or profile). Using both gives you maximum coverage.
The ArchiveTeam -- independent of though closely affiliated with the Internet Archive -- are presently setting up their run at archiving Google+ public content. That should be fairly comprehensive, though again it may miss some post and comments data. We'll have more information forthcoming here.