Google no longer wants your location history. At least you don’t want to save it on your servers, but rather it will be saved locally on your mobile. Along the way, Google may delete your entire Google Maps timeline of locations except for the last three monthssince this is the default configuration.
Sooner or later you will receive an email from Google informing you that you have a deadline to keep your calendar intact. Unless you indicate otherwise, once the date has expired, Google will only save – on your mobile – the last three months of routes and visits. The rest will disappear forever like tears in the rain.
What changes in Google Maps
No luck if you want to consult your timeline on the Google Maps site: you can no longer
For years, Google has saved our location history on its servers, which in Google Maps helps us check the timeline of where we have been or how many countries and cities we have visited. Now Google Maps will save the timeline locally on the mobile and not in the cloud.
As a result, you will not be able to view the timeline in its web version and you will have to transfer all your data from Google servers to your mobile. Google gives you a deadline for this to happen (which is not the same for all users) and if you don’t tell them otherwise I will try to save only the last three months of chronology. If you want to save everything, you must act.
Save your entire timeline
I turned on my location history on Google Maps in August 2013, which means you have to over ten years of recording everywhere I go. It would be a shame for me to lose this information and all the statistics generated from this data. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way.
In the email that Google sends us stating that we have until a certain day to keep our timeline, a direct link is included to choose your settings which allows us to backup our entire timeline, including data from more than three months ago.
If you do nothing, Google will accept that what you choose is Automatically delete after 3 months. This means you will always be able to view exactly three months of timeline and not one more day. Each new day recorded since then deletes an old day.
To save all your data you must choose Keep it until you delete it, this is how the timeline worked until now. Of course, the difference is that now they are saved on your mobile and not on Google servers. Indeed, the next step tells you the size of the download (which is quite small) and the download then takes place.
Before closing, you must choose an additional option, if you want to share timeline changes and other data with Google. Basically, Google asks you to share changes you make to the timeline (like editing a tour) in order to improve Google Maps.
And don’t forget the backup
Since then, your timeline will live on your mobile, which means if you lose your phone or it breaks, all your history is lost. To prevent this from happening, you can create a backup of your timeline in your Google account. This does not count towards your shared storage.
And what’s the difference between that and it being saved directly on Google’s servers like before? The difference is that this backup is encrypted and Google does not access its content: it is only used so that you can download it to your devices.
You can configure your timeline to be saved at any time, in Google Maps, by typing Timeline and by tapping the cloud icon. If the icon is crossed out, it means that backup is disabled.
You can import the copy to another mobile
The beauty of backup is that you can download it to your other phones. You can also achieve this by clicking on the cloud icon in the timeline section, but then you need to see the backup list which are saved in your account.
Press the menu button ⋮ and choose Matter for the backup to be downloaded to the current mobile. If this mobile already saves its own timeline, the days for which data has already been saved will not be overwritten by the save data.
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