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Comment by Ixiaus | Hacker News Reader

I use rclone to backup my Google Drive to S3. If you're not doing something similar, I recommend it (rclone will also export google docs to ODF formats).

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Note that the ODF conversion is happening on google's side - which means that if you have a cloud document above some embarassingly small size (like a Slides deck of the interns' end of year presentations with a couple of videos inside) ... you'll just get a size error, and there's nothing rclone can do to fix it. (Basically, pay attention to the warnings...)

Yes -- I've encountered this problem trying to back up Google Drive using multiple clients.

Sometimes a file download takes longer than 30s to start, either because it's converting, but also virus checks on large files. (For me it was always virus checks on PDF's over ~30MB).

You may need to change a timeout setting, so that your client will wait up to e.g. 5 min for a download to start its first byte.

I also run sync to an veracrypt encrypted flash drive. I think local storage is a key part of a personal data back up strategy

Unfortunately google’s own “sync to local” software is quite unreliable, at least on the Mac. Anyway its synced “files” are often just urls, so you can’t search them and the content isn’t actually downloaded.

I don’t understand why anyone relies on this.

That's why I prefer syncing to Veracrypt instead. If the Arm/M1 Macs didn't throw up such a fuss when installing MacFuse (which Truecrypt required too), using it would have been much easier.

The alternate suggested by Tinyapps was to use Parallels or VMWare running on an M1/M2 Mac and use the Windows version of Veracrypt which is a universal app that runs x86 and Arm, to mount your volumes.

Veracrypt is evolving and I think the latest release dropped some Truecrypt compatibility though.

I hope someone is "just using rsync" to backup their Dropbox.

Yes, I also hope that.

Should be very simple:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone sync dropbox:rsynctest rsynctestdirectory

... or something like that[1].

Oh, you meant rsync the command ...

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html

Sorry I was mistaken:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Hope someone is doing this to backup their Dropbox :-)

Do you run a daily cron or something? I've been trying to figure out how to backup my photos from google.

It was quite an adventure when I exported all my photos from Google Drive. It took Google a couple of days to get everything ready. Afterward, I downloaded around 15 zip files, each with a size of several gigabytes.

It was quite a task to unzip them all, perform deduplication, and import them into iCloud photos.

To keep them synced with S3, I am currently using an app called Photosync.

i did this last week. google takeout provided 40 or so zip files that are easily decompressed with a find -exec for the existing photos

Im now using synology photos to backup new photos to my nas as i take them

Just wait until you find out you don't have location data or the dates on photos from about 5 years are wrong. I think there's a reason the drive integration got shuttered.

Now that I think about it though, Takeout might include the location data until... they patch that "bug"to be more in line with the Photos API.

Sorry for this but on the off chance a single person anywhere near Photos sees this, your management chain is full of unrespectable scum. :) Gotta love Google.

Oh I know! Google completely trashed my photo collection GPS and timestamp data, I would never trust them as a backup anymore.

Check out rclone if you haven't yet. Im also a fan of duplicity.

I'd recommend combining it with something like rmlint for your daily cron jobs.

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