Hacker News Reader

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com