Jump to navigation
Jump to search
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!.
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 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 a Yahoo account or some other email provider (that has enough quota to work as your archive).
Google Docs
- GM Script by Peter Schafer - Download Google Docs en masse.
- gdatacopier - "Bi-directional copy utility & API for Google docs"
Google Calendar
Google Reader
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 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.
Miscellaneous
Does a tool suite exist that backs up all of the Google Apps cloud?
Vital Signs
Pump up the NASDAQ.