A Proven Method to Back Up Your Google Drive Files

When I first began operating Google Drive, I saved everything there. Lesson projects, job presentations, meeting notes, resumes, recipes, and family mailing lists.

Name it — all my files lived in my Google Drive because of how easy it was to access and share them. Regardless, the longer I used Google Drive, the more I utilized it while juggling various accounts (school, personal, and work). So, inevitably, I lost the path of where some of my favorite files were.

But then I faced a fundamental challenge: my university announced that it would soon delete Google’s academic accounts for my year. As I reviewed this change, I realized that many important files and emails are on the performance I need.

Sign in to the Google Account from which you want to copy your data

To be moderate, people own two email accounts, so it is essential to make sure you are logged in to the proper Google Account before beginning this process. Once logged in, go to Google Drive itself: drive.google.com.

Select the data you want to download

Here, you are able to choose to download archives from your Google Drive, as well as your Chrome bookmarks, locations stored in Google Maps, transactions from various Google services, Google Drive content, and other Google-related products that you can use.

When most people think about downloading data stored on Google Drive, they think about the documents, images, and other larger files they work with.

Still, Google Takeout clarifies that you have a lot more data stored with Google outside of Driving.

Decide how you want your files to be delivered

Once you have decided which parts of your Google data you want to download, you will need to choose what type of file you want to send as the frequency you want this action to take place.

As an illustration: if you want your data to be downloaded every time six months, this is where you can set this to happen) and the destination to which you want your data to be sent.

When choosing a destination to send your data to after downloading, you can choose whether the files should be emailed to you or sent to a synchronization service (if used) such as Dropbox or OneDrive.

What to do after you have your data in your inbox

An email will appear in minutes, hours, or days (depending on the size of the data you download), notifying you that your Google data is prepared to download. Once you hold this email in your inbox, you have one week to download the data.

Click the “download files” button in your email, and — beforehand — you will have a .zip or .tgz file on your computer with your Google data.

Conclusion for Google Drive backup

You now have your data with all your essential work outside of Google Cloud and your operating system. What’s next? The next big thing you need is to protect your newly downloaded Google data with a good cloud backup strategy.

Ensure you possess at least two backups: one local, one on your desktop or hard drive, and one in the cloud. The word “cloud” can be confusing because you just had your data in the cloud sync service, but we found a simple way to define synchronization versus backup.

Having two (or three) backups of your newly downloaded data guarantees that you will never lose those projects you worked on for hours.