Google’s social platform has never been very successful and, in a few weeks, it will close its doors for good. Here’s how to save your data
Google+ is about to close its doors and we’ve known about it since late 2018, but now the Mountain View house has released the official date and the information you need to save your content before the social network closes. If from February 1 it is no longer possible to create new profiles, pages, collections, communities or events, from April 2 Google+ begins to delete existing accounts and pages.
All other Google+ features, such as comments on Blogger and the other sites that have installed the G+ plug in for comments, will stop working and will be removed in the coming weeks: from February 7 comments from Blogger will disappear, from March 7 also from the other sites. Together with Google+, Google Hangouts, the chat and video meeting service that for many months has been the most advanced of all, but without being sufficiently appreciated by users, will be forgotten, while Google My Business tabs for local companies will not be touched.
In short, in view of the closure of Google+ it’s better to download the content you’ve published over the years, so as to shelter from digital oblivion photos and posts on the Big G’s social network.
How to download Google+ data
If you want to archive the content you’ve uploaded to your Google+ profile you’ll have to visit this page and select all the types of data you want to download and click “Next”. From the same page you can download all the data of our online presence collected by all Google products: those related to G+ are already pre-selected. On the next screen you can choose the format of the file in which our data will be stored (zipper or tgz) and the maximum size of the archive (above 2 GB the data will be compressed with the zip64 format). In addition, you can choose whether to receive an email with the link to download the data or upload the compressed file directly to our Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box account. At this point you just have to wait: Google’s servers will get to work to compress all our data and when they’re done we can download our archive. It may take several hours.
How to download Google+ page data
If we want to download the data of a page we manage, we’ll have to do the same procedure but after logging in as the page manager. If we have multiple pages, we will have to repeat the same operation for each of them. However, Google has stated that if at least one of the managers of the page is a G Suite user (i.e. Google’s suite of paid software and productivity tools, dedicated to corporate and institutional customers), and the page has been created with the G Suite account, then the page will not be deleted.