Merge and extract tgz files from Google Takeout

using-google-takeout.md

Recently found some clowny gist was the top result for 'google takeout multiple tgz', where it was using two bash scripts to extract all the tgz files and then merge them together. Don't do that. Use brace expansion, cat the TGZs, and extract:

$ cat takeout-20201023T123551Z-{001..011}.tgz | tar xzivf -

You don't even need to use brace expansion. Globbing will order the files numerically:

$ cat takeout-20201023T123551Z-*.tgz | tar xzivf -

tar has been around forever, they didn't design it to need custom scripts to deal with multipart archives. Since it's extracting the combined archive, there's no 'mess of partial directories' to be merged. It just works, as intended.

An additional tip, courtesy of Dmitriy Otstavnov (@bvc3at): if you have pv available, you can track the progress of the extraction:

> pv takeout-* | tar xzif -
 190GiB 2:37:54 [18.9MiB/s] [==============>                                   ] 30% ETA 5:03:49

This worked very well for a 6TB Google Photos Takeout data set consisting of 22 50GB TGZ files. Ran it via Ubuntu on Windows (WSL) and the file total matched the export.

Proof positive that tar does indeed work!

This really worked well. Thanks!

You're now the top result for "how to join .tgz google takeout"
Anyway it's just what I needed, cheers!

You're now the top result for "how to join .tgz google takeout"

Mission accomplished then. 😆 Had to displace the bad results with better results.

I mean I get that you have a better solution for tgz archives but the original author of the clowny gist created a solution that a) worked with zips and b) worked for whatever use case he had and felt he wanted to share it. I'm not sure it's fair to dismiss his result just because you don't like it. NB: I use your solution, I just don't like the dismissiveness of someone creating and sharing a solution, no matter how inefficienct it appears.

1. The scripts are also pointless for zip files, which have a similar one liner. At the time, zip downloads from takeout were limited to 2GB per file, versus 50GB per tgz file, so using zip was already a poor choice.
2. If someone makes a group of scripts that replicate the basic function of unix commands, badly, and people find them and use them because they're the best search result, the world becomes a dumber place. That deserves some slight ridicule. The original gist author removed the gist; only forks of it persist.

Protip for MacOS users: use gnu tar/gtar, not the built-in bsdtar. This just gave me a few days of headaches! It also appears that the built in archive utility won't correctly extract these files if they've first been cated.

Using pv instead of cat can help tracking progress of extracting archives:

> pv takeout-* | tar xzif -
 190GiB 2:37:54 [18.9MiB/s] [==============>                                   ] 30% ETA 5:03:49

This is a useful enhancement, though I note I didn't have pv installed by default in Ubuntu, so it's perhaps less portable. I'll add it regardless.

On MacOS (Mojave or Ventura+), there's a small mod:

pv takeout-* | gtar -xzif -

(if you don't have pv, then install with Homebrew: brew install pv. Also, MacOS uses bsdtar which doesn't support -i ignore zeroes, so use gnutar; installable with brew install gnu-tar)

What's the best option for macOS if I went with the zip option?

Re-request the Takeout with tar.gz. Otherwise, Stack Overflow: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/40565/19124

Just a note for those who exported zip on macOS. You can merge the zip files simply with:

unzip \*.zip [Return]

(backslash is to escape * which would be expanded by default)

source: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unzip-multiple-files-into-one-folder.1645539/

Thank you @chabala and @bvc3at! This worked for me on Windows 10 using Ubuntu on WSL. Glad I saw this as the top result.

gist comments are not a Q&A forum. If you have unix questions, ask them on StackOverflow.

@paradite Worked perfectly for zip files on MacOS - thank you!

The gnu-tar doesn't seem to support -i shorthand, needs the full --ignore-zeros to work.

pv takeout-* | tar --ignore-zeros -xzf -

gnu-tar doesn't seem to support -i shorthand, needs the full --ignore-zeros to work.

@Thinkscape are you sure you're using GNU tar? Because that's the same complaint made earlier about bsdtar, where installing GNU tar was the solution.

gnu-tar doesn't seem to support -i shorthand, needs the full --ignore-zeros to work.

@Thinkscape are you sure you're using GNU tar? Because that's the same complaint made earlier about bsdtar, where installing GNU tar was the solution.

My bad. homebrew linking mess got me this time ...

Thanks @paradite unzip \*.zip is all we need for zip archives.