Cloud storage is often used for backup, but finding myself relying more and more on cloud-only documents, I felt a need for backup in the opposite direction: backing up my entire Google Drive to local storage – preserving the folder hierarchy. I was not able to find a script that does this, so I wrote one myself. I chose to do it in bash, making use of the Python scripts of the previous post.
The main challenges were:
- Characters in file names: My script can handle any number of slashes and spaces in file names, but only single spaces in folder names.
- Multiple parent folders: When an already downloaded file appears again, a soft link is created to the already downloaded file. Could be a hard link instead – easy to change.
Downloads:
Installation:
- download and install gdata-2.0.14
- download and place the above python scripts somewhere on your
$PATH - make all scripts executable
- customize the local backup directory in
backup_google_docs.sh - for convenience: hard-code your Google email address in
backup_google_docs.sh
Now just execute backup_google_docs.sh and watch your Google Drive being downloaded.
