Google

Google logo until September 2015.

Google is currently one of the largest Internet-based companies in existence (if not THE biggest), hosting dozens of different services.

Google probably isn't evil per se, but they do want you to put all of your data on their servers. Trusting any one company that much is probably a bad idea. If your entire life is on Google, what happens to Google happens to you. For a remote idea of what can happen, look at Yahoo!.

Archive Team has decided to take a census of Google services, to see what has and hasn't been saved. See the Froogle project.

Backup Tools

DataLiberation is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. Here you can find instructions to backup from every Google service.

Blogger

• Google Blog Converters 1.0 uses Python to convert between Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType, and WordPress.

• Blogger can now export the entire contents of a blog, over at Blogger in Draft.

Gmail

• gmail_safe incremental gmail backup nodejs package. It saves thread information (Google Mail 'conversations') and Google Mail labels. It is decently fast (about 20 emails per second) without using much CPU or RAM.
• Gmail Backup allows you to backup your emails in EML format and optionally upload them again into a separate Gmail account.
• Gmail provides IMAP access, so you can use OfflineIMAP to backup and sync your complete archive in standard UNIX maildir format, usable by Mutt, Thunderbird and most sane e-mail clients. See this blog post for more details.
• POP access is a very simple way to continuously download all your emails in Gmail to your favorite email client. This method doesn't preserve the label/folder structure, though - but does include your emails that are sent from Gmail.
• You may also want to consider setting up forwarding of all your emails in Gmail to an Outlook account or some other email provider (that has enough quota to work as your archive).

Google Calendar

• Export your Google Calendar

Google Docs Editors

Tools

• GM Script by Peter Schafer - Download Google Docs en masse.
• gdatacopier - "Bi-directional copy utility & API for Google docs"

URL patterns

Note: Due to https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/wpull/issues/425 and Google's use of HTTP 307 Redirects, the Export Menu based URLs currently do not work in ArchiveBot. They also do not work in Chromebot. They do work in IA SPN. The view/edit/mobilebasic URLs do appear to work in AB and/or Chromebot.

Documents

Using Document docid 17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y (The Declaration of Independence - modern translation 2012) as an example:

• Document -> View/Edit/MobileBasic/HTML Export

1. https://docs.google.com/document/d/17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y/view
2. https://docs.google.com/document/d/17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y/edit
3. https://docs.google.com/document/d/17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y/mobilebasic
4. https://docs.google.com/document/d/17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y/export

• Document Export Menu Options -> odt, docx, pdf, zip (of HTML), epub, rtf, txt

1. https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=odt&id=17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y
2. https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=docx&id=17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y
3. https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=pdf&id=17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y
4. https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=zip&id=17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y
5. https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=epub&id=17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y
6. https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=rtf&id=17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y
7. https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=txt&id=17-kk6FR8PGku4XhCy2TFBSbEeIWUlm082qgaqXAP81Y

Spreadsheets

Using Spreadsheet docid 17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s (Recipe Cost Calculator) as an example:

• Spreadsheets -> View/Edit/XLSX Export

1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/view
2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/edit
3. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/export

• Spreadsheets Export Menu Options -> ods, xlsx, pdf, zip (of HTML), csv (current sheet), tsv (current sheet)

1. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/export?format=ods
2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/export?format=xlsx
3. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/export?format=pdf
4. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/export?format=zip
5. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/export?format=csv
6. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17SP23Ce2IuJQJx5qbBRGNiRuv0My_ddvcIZBTnBdA7s/export?format=tsv

Slides

Using Slide docid 1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y (Timing Individual Google Slides) as an example:

• Slides -> View/Edit

1. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/view
2. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/edit

• Slides Export Menu Options -> odp, pptx, pdf, png, jpg, svg, txt

1. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/export/odp
2. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/export/pptx
3. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/export/pdf
4. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/export/png
5. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/export/jpg
6. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/export/svg
7. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YHAddiVocHyU38NKT-SIFBMk0gHRg-DBDQOINRjV73Y/export/txt

Google Drive

• For content that should go into the IA WBM, ArchiveBot can be used to grab direct links to individual files. This example uses file id 19Vk6mrf6FY1iCKudKFjeQDXTfpGiElMd (for NTSB report 'WOA 8535 CVR Transcript.pdf'):
  • chromebot: a https://drive.google.com/file/d/19Vk6mrf6FY1iCKudKFjeQDXTfpGiElMd/view
  • !ao https://drive.google.com/uc?id=19Vk6mrf6FY1iCKudKFjeQDXTfpGiElMd&export=download

• wget can also be used with the 'export=download' URL. See https://clay-atlas.com/us/blog/2020/08/27/linux-en-wget-download-google-drive-files/
  • wget "https://drive.google.com/u/1/uc?id=19Vk6mrf6FY1iCKudKFjeQDXTfpGiElMd&export=download"

Additional tools that may be useful:

• https://github.com/odeke-em/drive

• https://github.com/segnolin/google-drive-folder-downloader

• https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse

• https://github.com/ericyd/gdrive-copy

• https://github.com/iwestlin/gd-utils (Chinese)

• https://github.com/iwestlin/gd-utils/blob/master/compare.md

• https://github.com/roshanconnor123/gd-utils (gd-utils, English fork)

• https://github.com/roshanconnor123/Gdutils_Tgbot

• https://github.com/prasmussen/gdrive

• https://itsfoss.com/use-google-drive-linux/

• https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-use-google-drive-on-linux

• https://www.driveexport.com/

Google Gears

• Is not a backup tool per se but at least for Google Docs and Gmail GGears downloads all documents/attachments to your computer as readable documents (which can be found in your user profile/Google folder(s)). Google Gears is no longer supported by Google.

Google Notebook

• Has been announced to be discontinued. GNotebook (luckily) has an export-to-XML function (a link at the bottom of the screen) that at least Diigo and Evernote are able to import (without coding skills).

Google Reader

An RSS/feed reader webapp with discoverability features for finding new feeds. On the 13th of March, Google announced that they would shut down Google Reader at 1st of July.

• Powering Down Google Reader
• A second spring of cleaning
• How to Back Up Articles from Google Reader
• How can I download my Reader data?

Miscellaneous

Does a tool suite exist that backs up all of the Google Apps cloud?

Generally, data can be exported with the "Google Takeout" interface which sends a series of compressed archives with data from the various services. It's not always reliable.

Vital Signs

Pump up the NASDAQ.

Google Photos

November 2018

Unsupported videos will no longer have unlimited space

Google Plus

April 2, 2019

Google+ was shut down. [1]

Inactive accounts

Starting on 2023-12-01, the content of accounts inactive for over 2 years will be eligible for deletion across all Google products: «if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents – including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar), YouTube and Google Photos.» After negative feedback, they excluded accounts with at least one YouTube video for the time being.

See the 2023-05-16 announcement.

Other

Over 280 products, including web services, discontinued by Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/

See also

• Google Books Ngram