A simple way to locally backup your Google Docs

One of the issues that I've always had with online document tools like Google Docs is that there's a kind of lock-in going on. Once your documents are in there, there's no easy way to get them out.

However, that's no longer true. Thanks to some smart software called GdataCopier, you can automatically download or upload files to Google Docs, in any of the formats which Google exports in.

I've set this up with my main machine to download everything every day, using a simple cron job – it should work for any platform which supports Python.