Playing it safe
Now that Google offers a legitimate social network, they are also offering a way to back up all of the important information stored in your Google account surrounding your social networking on their platform. While it does not combine with Google Docs or Google Reader, Google Takeout allows you to download everything you’ve ever shared on Buzz, your Google Profile, your Picasa (soon to be called Google Pictures) account, all of your Google+ contacts, +1s, Google+ status updates and even Google Voice (which we believe is particularly important for Realtors using the service to have a back up of).
When you visit, Google Takeout will ask you to log in again and it is okay, because it is not a third party, it is actually Google. You can download everything into one file, perhaps quarterly, or you can select each service independently – maybe you only want to back up your Google+ stream?
After you’ve selected what you want to download for backup, the site shows you how large the file will be and which services take up how much of that file. Then, it is all compressed into a ZIP file and becomes downloadable.
Going forward, more services will be added to Google Takeout so that users can eventually backup all Google services at once.
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