After years of trying to edge its way into social networking (remember Google Buzz?), Google is throwing in the towel and will shut down the consumer version of Google+ on April 2.
Google admits that adoption was weak; "90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds," a VP said last year. But the impetus for this year's shutdown was a security breach that exposed the private data of thousands of Google+ users. At first, Google planned to shut down Google+ in August 2019, but when another breach was uncovered, that date was moved up to April 2.
As a result, Google+ users now have less than a day to save their data before the platform goes dark for consumers. If you want to preserve your Google+ posts, comments, and media, here's how.
Go to Google Takeout
Takeout is a repository of all the data Google has stored about your account, from Google Drive and Google Photos to YouTube and Hangouts. You'll also find your Google+ data here.
Get started by navigating to takeout.google.com; if you're not already logged in, sign in with the account associated with the Google+ profile in question.
You will see a list of all the Google products associated with your account and by default, everything will be selected. To make things easier, click "Select None" up top, which will de-select everything.
Choose Your Data
Now, scroll down to find Google+. You will notice there is no single option for Google+ user data. Instead, there are several different pieces of information available for download: Google+ +1s on websites (your +1 recommendations); Google+ Circles (your contacts); Google+ Communities (your community data); Google+ Stream (all your posts); and Profile (your profile data).
This data is delivered in various formats. Your +1s will only be available in HTML, while your Profile data can only be attained in JSON. Meanwhile, you can choose between vCard, JSON, CSV, and HTML for Circles data. You can also choose specific Communities or Stream data to download, and select between JSON or HTML.
Click everything you want to download, scroll to the bottom, and click Next.
Select an Archive Format
Now you decide how to format all this information. First choose whether the files should come to you as a .zip or .tgz file.
Then choose the size of the archive folders. Options include 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 10GB, and 50GB. If your files are larger than your selected file size, Google will split them into separate folders. And anything over 2GB will be compressed into zip64 files.
Finally, decide how you want to receive a download link. Google can email it to you or add your files to cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box.
Download Your Data
Other Google+ Export and Migration Tools
If Google Takeout isn't to your liking, you can also use the third-party Google+ Exporter desktop app. It was specifically built to migrate Google+ data to WordPress, Blogger, and JSON according to your computer's OS.
Google+ Mass Migration is a community working to migrate the communities on the platform to a new destination. Many of the users in the group have discussed other options for migrating and downloading data.
Facebook Features Only Power Users Know
