Getting your data out in time

Shutdown notices follow a pattern. An announcement, a date when new use stops, a longer date when accounts close, and a short window after that during which the data is technically still there and practically unreachable. The safe assumption is that everything not exported by the first hard date is gone.

Read the dates properly

A wind-down usually carries several. The day sign-ups end, the day the service becomes read-only, the day accounts are closed, and the day backups are purged. Only the last is the true deadline, and it is the one least often stated, so plan against the read-only date instead: once a service stops writing, exports frequently stop working too.

Paid and free tiers are routinely given different dates, with free accounts closing first. If you are on a free plan, assume the earliest date on the page applies to you.

Export the richest format, not the convenient one

Take the machine-readable export — JSON, CSV, XML, or the service's own archive — even if a PDF or a printed page looks friendlier. Structured files are what an importer on the next service can read; a PDF is a picture of your data.

Then verify the archive before the date passes, rather than filing it unopened. Check that the file count is plausible, that attachments and images are actually inside rather than referenced by links that will die with the service, and that dates and names survived the export. Where the archive references remote files, download those separately while the service is still answering.

Start from the destination

Before exporting, pick where the data is going and look at what that service can import. Matching the export format to the importer saves the conversion work that otherwise falls on you, and it exposes early the things that will not transfer at all — sharing permissions, comment threads, automation rules, anything that existed only as a feature of the old product.

If the provider serves customers in the European Union, you also have a legal route independent of its export tool: a request for your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, which must be answered within a month. Make it in writing as soon as the notice appears, keep the reply, and take the complaint to the national data protection authority if nothing arrives. It is slower than clicking export, which is exactly why it should be started on day one rather than in the last week.