Put everything on one external drive

Takes a weekend if you request everything at once

Every service you use, merged into a single dated library on a disk you can hold, with duplicates across services removed and an index of what is in it.

Why bother

The simplest arrangement that survives you losing interest. No server to maintain, no subscription to forget, no account to be locked out of.

The bit people get wrong. One drive is one drive. It is a copy of your data, not a backup of it, until there are two in different places.
1

Ask each service for your data

Every service you use, all at once. They run independently and most take days, so the sooner they are all requested the sooner you can do the rest in one sitting.

Every export guide ->

2

Open it in your browser

Drop the archive into Muletto. It is read on your own machine - nothing is uploaded - and you get a timeline, your pictures, your conversations and a map of where you have been. Open several exports together and they merge into one library.

Large archives are fine. They are read in pieces rather than loaded whole, so size is not the limit it usually is in a browser.

Open an export ->

3

Clean it up before you move it

This is the step worth not skipping, because it is far easier now than once the files are spread across a disk.

  • Duplicates across services. The same photo backed up to two places is one photo. Muletto finds byte-identical copies and near-copies - a burst, a crop, a re-save - and you choose what a tidied library keeps.
  • Dates that got lost. Exports routinely strip the capture date, so everything looks like it was taken the day you downloaded it. Muletto reads the real date back out and writes it into the file itself.
  • Places. Where the coordinates survived, they are written back in too, so whatever you import into can put things on a map.
4

Put it on External drive

Muletto writes the tidied library straight out - into dated folders on a drive or a network share, or as a single archive. You choose the arrangement, and it writes an index of everything it wrote.

The destination guide covers the part that happens at the other end.

The External drive guide ->

When it is done

Every service you use, merged into a single dated library on a disk you can hold, with duplicates across services removed and an index of what is in it.

Keep the work file Muletto offers at the end. Export again next year and it recognises everything that carried over, so none of this has to be done twice.