services that would let me save data out of Google data centers on to
the local hard drive and here’s a quick summary of how things stand so
far:
While most Google tools allow you to walk away with your own
data, the process is not always as simple as you would like it to be.
Blogger and Google Photos (Picasa Web Albums) get the maximum points as
both these services make it extremely easy for users to download their
own content locally.
You can export any Blogger blog in a text file while the desktop
client of Picasa can pull down all your photo albums in a click. Flickr
has no download tools yet.
With Gmail, you can backup email messages locally via POP or IMAP
but this requires you to have a mail software on the desktop and the
process can be a bit tricky for non-techies. Yahoo! Mail offers no such
option for free users while Hotmail users can download emails on the
desktop through Windows Live Mail.
Now Facebook is often criticized for holding users data but Orkut,
Google’s own social networking platform, is not any different.
The only data you can export out of Orkut is a CSV list of your
Orkut friends’ email addresses and that’s it. Orkut exposes no RSS
feeds and unlike Facebook, there’s no option to download birthdays, contact photos, phone numbers, etc. out of Orkut. The same holds true for your scrapbook and email messages.
In case of Google Docs, you can save a local copy of documents
one-by-one manually but you won’t find something like an "Export All"
button. There’s a workaround using Greasemonkey but most Google Docs users looking to backup files onto a CD would want something simple.
There are a million ways to download videos from YouTube but you
never get access to clips in their original format. Therefore you
always need to keep a local copy of original video files even after
uploading them onto YouTube (or use blip.tv for backup).
This may come as a surprise but you can only export a maximum of 500
records from any Google Analytics report at a time. So if you have
large and popular website with few thousand pages, taking Analytics
data offline can be time consuming and very confusing as well.