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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I just have a script that takes a backup of my whole Google account every week.

I've never been suspended, but if I were, I would be able to recreate most of my digital life from that backup, and either create a new Google account or move my business elsewhere.

Nobody I've met has ever had their main Google account permanently suspended. There are stories of it online, but I suspect it might be a vocal tiny minority (I'd be pretty vocal if I lost my online life too!). I suspect most of that tiny minority are either doing really evil things, or have malware on their machines doing really evil things with their login.

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I suspect you are victim of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

"They need to do something evil to be suspended". They need not.

Do you do this incrementally? Or just grab everything every time? If the former, I'd be interested to hear how you go about it :-)

edit: actually, scratch the 'if', I'd be interested to hear the rough shape of your script anyway!

It just uses selenium to automate clicking on https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

And then when the promised email arrives I have a google docs script (pretty much googles copy of VBScript macros, but they can be run as a cronjob and easily search and access your email) which copies the data to my VPS and deletes the old copy of the data and the email.

And perhaps no one you know has been handicaped for life in a terrible accident. That’s no reason for not buying insurance. I backup all my local data offsite against a risk of my flat burning down. It’s a very remote possibility, it barely happens to anyone,... well it happened to me a few years ago!

I would love to see that script if you don't mind. Thank you. :)

Where are you going to recreate your google docs?

I have a similar script. It downloads my google docs in Word and Excel formats.

Not sure what you're using, but for anyone else looking, I've been using this - https://github.com/odeke-em/drive - to do the same

I'm using something I hand-wrote, but thanks for the pointer.

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