<p>Somewhere in a computer file system folder, tucked within a series of folders, locked in an archive compressed to a fraction of its original size (inside an encryption riddle, wrapped in a digital mystery) are all my old email files from when I used to use Lotus Notes, now known as IBM Notes. Lotus Notes! I realize some of you still use it, and this is not me chuckling quietly.</p><p>No, this is just me letting you know that Google in 2013 is finally going to catch back up with a program that's been around since the late 1980s: until today, you couldn't extract Gmail or Google Calendar information for archiving vis-a-vis an intuitive (and more importantly, native) Gmail or Google Calendar switch. You had to either trust Google to keep your stuff safe and backed up somewhere, or play a kind of digital version of Twister to extract said information by forwarding it to another email address, or doing the old single-client, multi-account drag-and-drop (followed by nerve-wracking seconds, minutes or hours, volume depending, for the copy operation to complete, sometimes with everything properly rolled over, sometimes not).</p><p>No more. Log into your Google account as of today, and under the "Account" section at left, you'll spy a new "Download your data" option. Pick that, and you'll have the option to create an archive that can include not only Gmail or Google Calendar but a smorgasbord of Google services, including Google Drive, YouTube, Blogger, Hangouts, Google+ stuff and so on. Once you've created the archive it takes a few moments, depending on size and how many services you've selected you can download it direct from the webpage. If you can't be bothered to hang around for the archive to coalesce, Google will fire over a reminder email notifying you when it's ready; click the email link and you're whisked off to an overview of all current archives.</p><p>How long does an archive stick around? One week, looks like: I created one today, and it's available through December 12. So you needn't worry about archive-overflow or manually deleting archives you've created.</p><p><a href="http://techland.time.com/2013/12/05/gmail-and-google-calendar-are-now-downloadable-just-not-your-brain-yet/">Keep reading...</a></p>