Regularly backing up a Google account

I've had my Google account for well over a decade and have accumulated a lot of emails, photos, etc. The risk that Google will lose my data is extremely small, but it's not unimaginable that I might accidentally delete data, or that I get locked out my account. Therefore, I periodically back up my account. Google provides https://takeout.google.com as a convenient way to do so. Here's how in more detail:

Incremental backup

As it turns out gmail and photos use most space, so it's worthwhile to do an incremental backup on these items and simply do a full backup on everything else.

1. gmail
1. empty trash
2. in gmail's search bar, type "after:2021/01/01" (adjust the date)
   
   
   
3. hit the selection checkbox to select all mails
4. hit the "Select all conversations that match this search" link
5. hit the "label" button and select "Create new label"
   
6. select a descriptive string, e.g. "backup-20210101-20210307"; this label will be used later
2. photos:
1. create an album for all photos since the last backup, e.g. "Backup 2021-01-01 to 2021-03-07"
2. tag all photos in the timeline after the last backup with this album; this album will be used later
3. create an export in https://takeout.google.com
1. select the backup label for mail
2. select the just created backup mail label for Mail
3. select the just created backup album for Photos
4. select all files in Drive but uncheck the photos (if that corresponds to Google Photos
5. choose Drive as the destination of the takout archive; zip files greater than 2Gb work fine
4. wait for takeout to complete
5. copy the takeout zipfiles from Drive to another medium, e.g. an external drive
6. delete the takeout zipfiles in Drive
7. schedule the next backup in Google Calendar as a reminder