How to Download and Backup all your Google Docs files with one click

If you are like me and like to have everything backed up and available on your computers (and other mobile devices) at any time you’re probably using solutions like Dropbox and Google Docs. If with Dropbox your files are also stored on your PC, so you’re covered on matter what not the same can be said about Google Docs, or any of their services for that matter.

What it means to you is that at any given moment if your Google account is unavailable (or closed for some reason) it’s almost impossible for you to access your files. You can imagine how this becomes a serious problem if you’re using Google Docs for work purposes and share project files with your team members.

That’s why I thought of writing a very short tutorial about how to backup all your Google Docs files with one click. It’s a new functionality added by Google, meant to complement and improve on the old Download as  function in from the File menu, which is accessible from within each document. While the old function required you to download each file separately, now in the new Google Docs interface is possible to download all files, or a selection, with just a single click.

Here are the (few) steps required:

1. Select one or more files from the main page that lists your documents. A contextual menu will appear above the file list. Select More  - Download …  to continue

Selecting the files to download/backup in Google Docs

2. The Convert and Download dialogue appears. You can choose from here to download only the selected files or all files (there’s a list of the types of documents you have and the count for each). Additionally you can choose to convert them for Microsoft Office, Open Office or PDF. The last one is great for archiving and maintaining a format that looks the same on all devices that support PDF files.

Download and Conversion options

3. Wait a few seconds for the download link to be displayed or the download to start automatically.

That’s it, this is a very easy and efficient way to backup all your Google Docs files to your computer. The file generated by Google contains also the current date, making it easier to keep multiple backups.

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