Image HOW TO: Take Your Data Back From Google’s Claws

We’ve all pretty much become accustomed to the notion that Google () is this invincible internet giant which will always be there for us, but it’s not always true. A good example was this weekend’s fiasco, when (due to human error) Google’s search engine reported all web sites on the internet as unsafe.

Let’s face it: every web service, Google included, can mess up, and sometimes it means losing your data. So, when was the last time you backed up the data on the various Google services you use? I thought so. Let’s look at some easy solutions for extracting and backing up your data on popular Google apps and services.

Google Docs

There are several great ways to backup your Google documents. One is a Greasemonkey script, called Google Docs: Download, that lets you download all of them at once.

If you’re looking for an automated solution, check out Syncplicity, which lets you sync Google Docs and your Office documents (among other things). You get 2 gigabytes of storage and support for two computers with a free account; if you need more, you can get 50GB and support for an unlimited number computers for $9.99 per month. Check out a more detailed explanation of how this works in one of our older Google Docs backup articles.

Another alternative is Zoho, a great online Office suite in itself; one of the features it offers is importing documents from Google Docs to Zoho Writer.

Gmail

With Gmail, it’s easy: simply forward all your e-mail to another address. Whether it’s going to be a different web email service such as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail or another Gmail () account is up to you. Furthermore, you can simply download all your e-mail via POP support to a desktop e-mail client such as The Bat or Thunderbird ().

*Update: a friend just pointed out that it’s against Google’s TOS to use a POP3 account to grab all the emails from your account. If you try that, your account might get locked by Google. You can, however, use it to archive all the e-mails you’ll receive in the future.

Google Reader

If you want to make sure all of your feed subscriptions don’t just disappear one day, I suggest you create a backup. In Google Reader, click on “Manage subscriptions” in the lower left corner, then on “Import/Export”, and then on “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file.” If you want to back up individual articles, I don’t know of any good way to do it, but there is a slightly convoluted method you can use for emergencies.

Google Calendar

Bar Gmail, Google Calendar is the web application I use the most. All of my errands are in there, and I don’t use any other reminder/calendar applications. Needless to say, if I lost that data, I’d be pretty angry. Luckily, you can back up your calendar(s); click on “Settings” under “My Calendars,” and then choose “Export My Calendars - Download a zipped file containing each of your calendars in .ics format.”

Of course, this is just a crude backup solution; you can also synchronize Google Calendar with your Microsoft Outlook Calendar using Google’s official tool called Google Calendar Sync.

If you’re not a fan of Microsoft Outlook Calendar, you can also use a recent Google tool called Calaboration which lets you sync your Google Calendar with iCal.

iGoogle

Similarly to Google Reader (), if you’re an avid iGoogle user, you want to make sure you’ll never lose your subscription list. Luckily, you can also back it up in iGoogle Settings: click on “Export iGoogle settings to your computer” and you’ll get an XML file containing everything you need to restore the contents of your iGoogle account.

Blogger

This is as simple as can be: if you want to backup your Blogger () blog, there’s a tried and tested tool called Blogger Backup which does exactly that.

Picasa

Backing up your photos from Google’s online photo storage/sharing application Picasa Web Albums is easy: go to “Tools” and then click “Backup Pictures.” It’s unlikely that you don’t already have these photos on your hard drive (and in higher quality), but if you don’t you should definitely create a local backup.

YouTube

Again, if you upload something to YouTube () you probably have a local backup of the video. If for any reason you want to download a video from YouTube to your hard drive, there are a lot of alternatives for downloading YouTube videos, and recently YouTube started experimenting with adding this option to videos themselves.

Any other Google services you’d like to backup? Any alternatives for backing up data from the above mentioned services? Please share your thoughts in the comments.