Google Photos is convenient until you need a copy that lives outside Google. Maybe you are cleaning up an old account, preparing to leave Google Photos, protecting family photos from account trouble, or just trying to make sure one mistaken delete does not wipe out years of memories.
This guide walks through the workflow end to end: Google Takeout for the export, a local staging drive for the download, and a real backup target for long-term protection.
Why Is Google Photos Backup Not a Real Backup?
Google Photos "Backup" feature uploads photos and videos into Google's cloud, but it does not create an independent, restorable copy outside Google. In a 2022 Backblaze survey of 2,068 U.S. adults, 54% reported data loss and only 10% backed up daily (, you accidentally delete photos, or you want to leave Google Photos later.
Accidental deletion is the single biggest cause of data loss in a 2025 Handy Recovery survey of 1,000 U.S. adults (.
Google Photos can also remove local device copies after they are backed up. Google's . Drive failure is not theoretical: Backblaze's 2025 drive report analyzed 344,196 hard drives and found a 1.36% annualized failure rate across the year (). A library that Google reports as 200 GB can easily need 400+ GB of staging space once you account for both the zip files and the extracted folders.
How Do You Create a Google Takeout Export?
Create the export in
Scroll to Google Photos and select the checkbox to the right of Google Photos.
The All photo albums included button opens the album selector. It includes regular albums and generated entries such as Photos from 2024, Photos from 2025, and other year folders. For backup purposes, exporting everything is safer than selecting only the auto-created "Photos from year" entries. Google Photos can store files in albums, shared albums, and other generated folders. You want the full Takeout output, then let your backup software deduplicate repeated files later.
Configure the export
The next Takeout screen is Choose file type, frequency & destination. This is where you choose how Google delivers the export and how large each archive file can be.
The Transfer to dropdown includes options such as Send download link via email, Add to Drive, Add to Dropbox, and Add to Box. For a backup, the email download link is usually the cleanest option because you can download the archives straight to your staging drive instead of first copying them into another cloud account.
For File type, choose .zip unless you specifically prefer .tgz and know your restore tools handle it well. Zip files are easier for most people to open on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
After you choose the settings, click Create export.
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How Long Does Google Takeout Take for Google Photos?
Google Takeout can take minutes, hours, or several days to prepare a Google Photos export. Small libraries may finish quickly, medium libraries often take several hours, and large libraries commonly take one to three days. Wait for Google's completion email before scheduling the download.
How Do You Download All Google Takeout Archives?
Download every Takeout archive into one staging folder on a drive with enough free space for the complete export. If Google creates seven zip files, all seven must finish downloading before extraction. Missing one archive can leave gaps in years, albums, videos, or metadata sidecar files.
- Open the link from the email in your browser.
- Press the first Download button.
- In the save file dialog, navigate to the folder where you want to store the archives. Make sure that drive has enough free space.
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 for every archive file.
- Keep the computer awake until all downloads finish.
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How Do You Extract Google Takeout Files?
Extract all Takeout archives into one merged destination folder, then keep both the media files and the .json sidecar files. Google Photos can place dates, location edits, descriptions, and other details in those JSON files, so deleting them reduces what a future restore or migration can recover.
How to unzip Google Takeout on Windows
- Put all the Google Takeout
.zipfiles in one folder. - Create a destination folder called
Google Takeout Extracted, for exampleC:\Users\Simon\Downloads\Google Takeout Extracted. - Right-click the first archive and choose Extract All....
- Click Browse... and select the same destination folder.
- Repeat for each remaining
.zipfile, always choosing that same destination folder. - When Windows asks about duplicate files, choose Skip.
How to unzip Google Takeout on macOS
- Create a folder called
Google Takeout Extracted. - Move all Takeout
.ziparchives into it. - Select all archives.
- Right-click and choose Open With -> Archive Utility.
- When extraction is done, delete the
.zipfiles, leaving the combined extracted folder contents behind.
How to unzip Google Takeout on Linux
Create a merged destination folder called google-takeout-extracted, then unzip each Takeout archive into it:
mkdir -p ~/Downloads/google-takeout-extracted
for z in ~/Downloads/takeout-*.zip; do
unzip -n "$z" -d ~/Downloads/google-takeout-extracted
done
Keep the JSON metadata files
Google Takeout separates some Google Photos metadata into .json sidecar files, so your backup should preserve both the media files and their matching JSON files. Do not delete the JSON files just because they are not photos; our test export had enough of them that they looked like clutter at first.
This messiness is normal. Google Photos stores dates, location edits, descriptions, and other details outside the original file in some cases. For a backup, you usually do not need to repair EXIF metadata immediately. Keep the files as exported. If you ever migrate into another photo app, you can decide then whether to use a metadata repair tool.
How Do You Back Up the Extracted Google Photos Folder?
Back up the extracted Takeout folder with software that creates encrypted, versioned snapshots you can restore later. The important distinction is that the folder now lives outside Google Photos; backing it up separately gives you an independent copy with history instead of another sync-only copy.
A Mixbook survey reported by TechRadar in 2023 found that only 35% of respondents regularly backed up camera-roll photos, while the average phone held 3,139 pictures and videos ( to find the right tool for your setup.
Back Up the Folder with BlinkDisk
To follow these steps,
After the vault is created, press Add folder and select the extracted Takeout folder you created in the previous step.
Your Google Photos export now has an encrypted backup snapshot outside Google.
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