this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Technology

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downloading gmails (beehaw.org)
submitted 10 months ago by toothpicks@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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my gmail account is full, most of the space is emails. I tried to download them through "takeout" and it has an option that says hey let's split this up into 2GB chunks. And you select that and it sends you one 12GB .mbox file regardless. The 12GB download keeps failing and now it says you've already downloaded these files too many times. Like gimme a break. Anyone have any experience with this? Any ways to get around the download failing or to force it to send you smaller chunks? Suchhhh a pain.

I hope to move to a different mail thing at some boint. I know y'all are gonna tell me don't use gmail dont use gmail lol.

Thanks!

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[–] e0qdk@kbin.social 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Any ways to get around the download failing

I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:

  • backup the .part file from the failed download
  • restart the download (careful -- if you didn't move/back it up, it will be deleted and you will have to download the whole thing again; found this out the hard way on a 50GB+ file... that failed again)
  • immediately pause the new download after it starts writing to disk
  • replace the new .part file with the old .part file from earlier (or -- see [1] below)
  • Firefox might not show progress for a long time, but will eventually continue the download (I saw it reading the file back from disk with iotop so I just let it run)
  • sanity check that you actually got the whole thing and that it is usable (in my case, I knew a hash for the file)

[1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file -- I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last ~1MB cut off.)

There are probably better options in most cases -- like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive -- but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.

[–] toothpicks@beehaw.org 6 points 10 months ago

THANK YOU! This seems to have worked. Now I just have to figure out how what to do with the .mbox file.