PRS 4 U: Now Download Gmail and Google Calendar Data to Your Local PC

Now a days emails contains some of our most critical/precious data along with the other non-critical but important messages . One email service that has become default email for most of the people is Google’s Gmail . It is free , it is fast , it is more reliable , it’s user interface is clean , the ads are not cluttered , it has so many features/options , and it is connected to all other Google services . There are number of these features that people prefer to use GMail email service in comparison to Yahoo Mail or MS Outlook (the new online version) or any other company’s email service .

With so many people using it , Google till date had not provided any official option to download all the email data for backup or exporting to other email tools like Outlook desktop . There are some 3rd party tools/apps available for this but they are not much reliable and are not so easy for a non-tech guy to use . But now Google has announced that you can download your GMail data and also the Google Calender data to your local computer in an archive file (following other services data is already available for export/download : Google Contacts , Google Drive , Google Voice , Google Hangouts , Google Plus , Youtube , and Orkut)

This new feature to export Gmail and Calendar data is now available in Google’s Takeout service.

Having access to your data and being able to take it with you is important, especially if that data contains precious memories like old love letters, your first job offer, or that 100-message thread discussing the merits of various cat videos. Starting today we’re rolling out the ability to export a copy of your Gmail and
Google Calendar data, making it easy to back up your data or move to another service.

You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data.

How to do it :

Go to this link of Google Takeout
Select the data you want to download (for now only Google Calender’s data is available , GMail data will be available from Jan. 2013)
Click on Create Archive
The default file format for the data archive is .zip but if you want (or if the data size is quite large) , you can change the format to more compressed .tgz or .tbz formats , by clicking on the “change” link along the same line .
The archive will be created in time depending up on the data size , you will get email message when archiving is completed
Now when data archive is created , you will get option to download it to your local computer
Just click on the Download and save the file on your computer
The created data archive can be downloaded till 7 days from Google Takeout , after that that archive will be deleted and you will have to re-create it to download
The data format for archives will be “mbox” for Gmail and “ics” for the Calendars . Both these formats are supported by major of popular web and desktop-based email and calendar programs like Microsoft Outlook 2011, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Apple’s Mail