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Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

Everyone hates making backups. Everyone loves them when something happens.

There are many free online data storage systems. If you're happy with the privacy implications, it's not hard to run Google Drive, Dropbox and box.net on the same directory for some degree of resilience.

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Note that this wouldn't have helped him in this case. The .gdoc files are only "links" to the online version, which he deleted from the online interface, while clearing the trash.

Backuping them over Dropbox/Box/Skydrive/* would have been useless, as he still has those .gdoc files anyway. To actually get a backup, he would have saved the files as .doc/.pdf/any other classic format from Google Docs.

I'm not saying that backups are useless, mind you - Only that they wouldn't have helped in this specific case.

You might be missing the point. How was he supposed to back up a .gdoc file? In fact he did, it's just when he put the file back it was deleted.

Google Drive gives you this fake file pointer that it wants you to think is a document, but then when you try to use it as such (backup and restore), you find out the files actually got deleted.

This is a case of shitty UI, plain and simple.

You can't make backups of gdoc files, the content is never stored locally, it's only on googles servers.

https://code.google.com/p/gdocbackup/

It's not possible to schedule an occasional job that copies everything from Google's services to a local hard disk?

Can you explain how that would have helped him at all? Backing up gdoc files is useless if the underlying file in the cloud has been deleted.

Because the backup should have been of the documents, not the gdoc files.

While this is a good strategy for real files, the .gdoc files in your Google Drive folder are nothing but links to web files. They contain no real data.

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