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Tuesday, 21 February 2023

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Gargantuan Takeout Rocket – Google Takeout Transloader to Azure

Show HN: Gargantuan Takeout Rocket – Google Takeout Transloader to Azure
9 by crazysim | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Been broken for 4 months, just got back to fixing it and validating. Figured I'll repost this. Gargantuan Takeout Rocket (GTR) is a toolkit to make the pain of backing up a Google account to somewhere that's not Google a lot less. At the moment the only destination supported is Azure. It's a guide, a browser extension, a Cloudflare worker to deploy, and Azure storage to configure. This sounds like buzzword creep, but believe me, every piece is extremely important. It's very cheap to run/serverless. You can backup a Google account at about $1/TB. Compared to renting a VPS to do this, it's much more pleasant. You aren't juggling strange URLs, needing big beefy boxes to buffer large data, or trying to login to Google or pass URLs through a VPS. Unfortunately, not everything about the procedure can be automated. But whatever can be, is. It's very fast. 1GB/s is the stable default and recommended speed. However, you can have about 3 of these going at a time for about 3GB/s+ overall. This trick is accomplished by making Azure download from Google to a file block, a unique API not seen in S3 or S3-like object storage. Unfortunately, Azure has URL handling bugs and only supports HTTP 1.1, greatly limiting parallelism. We can use Cloudflare Workers to work around these issues. I use GTR myself with a scheduled Google Takeout every two months to backup 1.5TB of data from Google. This can be photos, YouTube videos, etc. I can finish my backups to safe non-Google storage in 15 minutes after I get an email from Google that my Takeout is ready to be downloaded. Unfortunately the only destination is currently Azure. There's also no encryption support. And also Cloudflare is involved. That said, if you're fine with this, this is a fine way to backup a Google and Youtube account as-is.

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