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While I know the community mods are advocating the use of F+ME as the preferred tool for migrating, I think it's...

While I know the community mods are advocating the use of F+ME as the preferred tool for migrating, I think it's really important to also use Google Takeout, whenever it becomes usable/stable/etc, to preserve your data.

All these new networks still working on coming online will then have a standard formatted json file to uses as an import base, which undoubtedly will be valuable information to help those networks get immediately filled with content.

As much as it sucks that Google doesn't understand the value of Google+, the value of our data, for the last 7 years, is still worth it for other people to do some fun things with it that could be interesting.

But that's only if you have it, and that's a time limited offer to get it before April 2.

Comments

  1. What is the F+ME migration tool that you're referring to? Is it what's mentioned in the https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/Uaq1XpAugkH previous post here ?

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  2. wara zashi We are, and are in fact recommending several tools, each of which addresses specific needs and limitations. There's some context here.

    Google Data Takeout (GDT) was entirely insufficient for much of the past five months. The archives created were huge, inconsistent, unmageable, and for most users, unusable. This has changed, but only very recently, and there remain critical limitations to the tool. It was not clear if this would occur at all.

    Friends+Me Google+ Exporter (F+MGE) works, is well-supported, flexible, and offers capabilities GDT does not and will never have. This includes Community export (GDT lacks this entirely now), non-Mod / non-Owner community export (a feature GDT is pledged to have "in early March"), or private community export (GDE *will not have this capability). F+MGE can download only textual content, or include images (GDT always includes graphical content, greatly increasing archive size). F+MGE can make incremental archives -- as shutdown approaches, you can refresh your archive, capturing new content whilst preserving old posts, comments, profiles, and communities that have since been deleted from G+. F+MGE can automatically submit content to the Internet Archive to be saved in the Wayback Machine. And F+MGE can automatically import your Google+ content to Wordpress or Blogger sites. With modest scripting, it can support many other destination targets.

    As limitation, F+MGE may miss some posts or comments, in cases, due to its crawling methods. But generally, it does an excellent job, and complements GDT exceedingly well.


    There are other cases where neither GDT nor F+MGE are suitable. Most especially are very large Communities, or users with only mobile access, no desktop system(s), slow, unreliable, or expensive Internet service, etc. There are several server-side mechanisms for porting Google+ content which are appropriate here. These include Romain Vialard's Firebase exporter, WikiFactory, LifeCloud, and PASHpost.

    And there are additional third-party and independent tools which may also be useful.

    In backups and migration, more options, paths, and (so long as you can resolve inconsistencies) archive versions tend to be better. I'm anticipating that addressing questions of how to process various archives will be a major factor moving forward.

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  3. We don't know if Takeout of the G+ data will stop working on 2-April because Google hasn't told us. But it does seem likely.

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  4. Julian Bond Google's present statement is:

    On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted. You can download and save your content, just make sure to do so before April.

    support.google.com - Shutting down Google+ for consumer (personal) accounts on April 2, 2019 - Google+ Help

    That sounds like a "no" to me, though I believe the question's been asked by G+H mod Julie Wills.

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  5. I am still waiting for an official response to the question about whether Takeouts started before 2 April will run to completion before any of the user's data is deleted.

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  6. Julie Wills That's half the question. The other half is whether the G+ options in takeout will still be available on April 3. I know it can be inferred that they will disappear on 2-April and we are told and advised to start our final Takeout downloads before 2-April but I wish Google would make this explicit and completely unambiguous.

    I also think this is a mistake. G+ Takeouts should be possible for a month or so after the G+ Sunset. The UI may close, but data should not start being deleted immediately, and G+ Takeout should not be shut off immediately.

    There are a lot of previous examples where Google has closed a service, removed the UI, but allowed people a grace period to grab a copy. Buzz and Orkut are the two most obvious ones.

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  7. And especially since 1) Google are still fixing bugs in G+Takeout and 2) because they've promised new features in G+Takeout starting in Mar with less than a month to run.

    What's the damn rush, ffs!

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  8. Julian Bond I'm hoping that the reason for the rush becomes apparent, and not too long after the shutdown.

    Though that presumes there is one.

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