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Comment by angrygoat | Hacker News Reader

The biggest downside with Google's offering (I don't know about Zoho) is that there is no way to easily export all of your documents to an array of bytes that can be saved in another system – also known as a file.

Seriously – if you use Docs or Sheets and want to move off, you've either got to manually export everything to an interchangeable format, or just give up and leave a bunch of stuff behind.

This is a particular pain when shifting between Google accounts, or closing an account down (for example, at the end of a job.)

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I don't know what specific issues you're having, but for me I can simply do a select-all in Google Drive, right click and hit Download.

After some time of processing it'll eventually give me a .zip which contains all the documents and files. Google Docs documents are exported as MS Word .docx files. I don't have any spreadsheets to hand, but I believe they're exported as .xlsx format files too.

e: I see Google Takeout also allows you to export these, too in choice of formats: https://takeout.google.com/

Yeah. It's pretty easy. Google Takeout is great.

BACK UP YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT PERIODICALLY. GOOGLE CAN AND DOES RANDOMLY DISABLE THEM WITH THEIR CHAOS MONKEY ACCOUNT THWACKER. If they detect suspicious activity -- and their algorithms aren't particularly good here -- they WILL close your account, wipe your data, and there is no support.

Fear of that is why I migrated all of my primary stuff off of Google during lockdown while I had more time.I used everything google had too at the time, even google Fi. My services are a bit more spread out now, but they are also more robust and don’t have a single catastrophic point of failure, besides my fragile body.

Ah, thanks – it sounds like it's better than when I was bitten by this (three or four years ago.)

I use rclone and it automatically downloads all of my Docs as .docx and Sheets as .xlsx.

The only pain point is that the Drive API seems to omit checksums for these types of files, so they're always downloaded even when they haven't changed.

I only have a handful of these so it's only a minor annoyance but I imagine it could get ugly if you are a heavy user.

> also known as a file

What? Visit https://drive.google.com/ and your files are there.

The parent was talking about the proprietary format of Google's Docs, Sheets, etc, which cannot be downloaded as they are.

Oh but they can, if you have google drive in your desktop you'll see that they are a .gsheets document for example.

Does the .gsheets file contain the actual data or is it just a link to an online copy?

Expand all the messages in this[^1] Google support thread, and note the comments from "Craig[^2]."

Or, even better: open a .gsheets or any .gEXT file in your favorite text editor. You'll see that they are comprised of web markup language, much like an XML doc. I don't have one in front of me atm, but I recall thinking, "it's basically XML that points one's browser to the appropriate Google app and a unique ID for the document."

[^1]: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/10078336?hl=en [^2]: https://support.google.com/docs/thread/10078336?hl=en&msgid=...

Gsheet is just a link to the online copy. It's useless as a backup.

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