jmiller inc. blog
Posted on May 24, 2010 by Jeff Miller
A few years ago, when I started using Google Calendar so heavily that I more or less ran my entire life off of it (and still do), I wrote a Python script to automatically backup all of my Gcal data to local disk. Same for Google Documents–I had one script that would download all of my Gdocs documents and zip them up into a nice package for safe storage on my local computer (which was in turn backed-up offsite).
This worked well for a long time, but in the intervening years Google has streamlined the export capabilities of Gcal and Gdocs to the point where automated scripts are not really worth the trouble to maintain anymore. It’s dead-easy to manually download a zip archive of all of your calendars and documents directly from the Google web apps.
Here’s how to backup Google Calendar and Google Docs in 60 seconds.
Backing up Google Calendar
1. Navigate to https://www.google.com/calendar/render
2. In the left-hand sidebar, at the bottom of the My calendars list, click the Settings link. This will take you to a Calendar Settings page.
3. On the settings page, click the Export calendars link at the bottom of your list of calendars. This will cause your browser to download a zip file containing each of your calendars in .ics format.
4. Backup that zip file somewhere safe.
Backing up Google Docs
1. Navigate to https://docs.google.com
2. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, select All Items. (Or Owned by me, or whichever set of documents you want to back up.)
3. In the “checkbox” dropdown menu immediately to the left of the Share menu, click on Select all visible. Important note: if you’re like me and you have lots of documents (over 100), they might not all be visible at first. If this is the case, scroll the list down to the bottom so that all documents become visible by the browser; then, click on Select all visible.
4. Click Export… from the More actions menu. This will bring up a dialog box.
5. From there, Google lets you choose which file format to download for each document type. Once you’re finished choosing, click the Download button. This will cause your browser to download a zip file containing each of your documents in the formats you selected. It may take a while for the download to begin.
6. Backup that zip file somewhere safe.
Don’t forget
I’ve also found it helpful to create a recurring event in Google Calendar that will send an email once a month with a reminder to backup your data.
©
Posted on May 24, 2010 by Jeff Miller
A few years ago, when I started using Google Calendar so heavily that I more or less ran my entire life off of it (and still do), I wrote a Python script to automatically backup all of my Gcal data to local disk. Same for Google Documents–I had one script that would download all of my Gdocs documents and zip them up into a nice package for safe storage on my local computer (which was in turn backed-up offsite).
This worked well for a long time, but in the intervening years Google has streamlined the export capabilities of Gcal and Gdocs to the point where automated scripts are not really worth the trouble to maintain anymore. It’s dead-easy to manually download a zip archive of all of your calendars and documents directly from the Google web apps.
Here’s how to backup Google Calendar and Google Docs in 60 seconds.
Backing up Google Calendar
1. Navigate to https://www.google.com/calendar/render
2. In the left-hand sidebar, at the bottom of the My calendars list, click the Settings link. This will take you to a Calendar Settings page.
3. On the settings page, click the Export calendars link at the bottom of your list of calendars. This will cause your browser to download a zip file containing each of your calendars in .ics format.
4. Backup that zip file somewhere safe.
Backing up Google Docs
1. Navigate to https://docs.google.com
2. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, select All Items. (Or Owned by me, or whichever set of documents you want to back up.)
3. In the “checkbox” dropdown menu immediately to the left of the Share menu, click on Select all visible. Important note: if you’re like me and you have lots of documents (over 100), they might not all be visible at first. If this is the case, scroll the list down to the bottom so that all documents become visible by the browser; then, click on Select all visible.
4. Click Export… from the More actions menu. This will bring up a dialog box.
5. From there, Google lets you choose which file format to download for each document type. Once you’re finished choosing, click the Download button. This will cause your browser to download a zip file containing each of your documents in the formats you selected. It may take a while for the download to begin.
6. Backup that zip file somewhere safe.
Don’t forget
I’ve also found it helpful to create a recurring event in Google Calendar that will send an email once a month with a reminder to backup your data.
©
