Google Apps Hacks

21

HaCK

# 08

  - BACK UP ALL YOUR GOOGLE DOCS FILES

HaCK 08:

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Make your backups before something bad happens, not

afterwards.

Google no doubt backs up your Google Docs data on some of their many servers. And old versions

of your document still live on through their revision history. But when you delete a document, there’s

no getting it back. You can minimize the damage of such accidents by storing copies of Google Docs

documents on your hard disk (from which you can burn them on CD, copy them to your USB stick,

upload them to other storage services or your own server, and so on).

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If you have only a couple of word processing documents or presentations to back up, here’s what you

can do. Log in to Google Docs and in the le listing pane, select all of your les of a single type—only

documents, or only presentations—one by one. Then open the “More actions” menu on top and pick

“Save as HTML (zipped).” You can now select a folder on your hard drive and let the download begin.

However, this method is very limited, at least at the time of this writing. For one thing, Google Docs

won’t let you select different le types for download (like a mixture of word processing documents and

presentations). Also, downloading won’t work if you select more than a single spreadsheet at once.

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But there’s an ...