I use rclone to backup my Google Drive to S3. If you're not doing something similar, I recommend it (rclone will also export google docs to ODF formats).
Note that the ODF conversion is happening on google's side - which means that if you have a cloud document above some embarassingly small size (like a Slides deck of the interns' end of year presentations with a couple of videos inside) ... you'll just get a size error, and there's nothing rclone can do to fix it. (Basically, pay attention to the warnings...)
Yes -- I've encountered this problem trying to back up Google Drive using multiple clients.
Sometimes a file download takes longer than 30s to start, either because it's converting, but also virus checks on large files. (For me it was always virus checks on PDF's over ~30MB).
You may need to change a timeout setting, so that your client will wait up to e.g. 5 min for a download to start its first byte.
Unfortunately google’s own “sync to local” software is quite unreliable, at least on the Mac. Anyway its synced “files” are often just urls, so you can’t search them and the content isn’t actually downloaded.
That's why I prefer syncing to Veracrypt instead. If the Arm/M1 Macs didn't throw up such a fuss when installing MacFuse (which Truecrypt required too), using it would have been much easier.
The alternate suggested by Tinyapps was to use Parallels or VMWare running on an M1/M2 Mac and use the Windows version of Veracrypt which is a universal app that runs x86 and Arm, to mount your volumes.
Veracrypt is evolving and I think the latest release dropped some Truecrypt compatibility though.
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
It was quite an adventure when I exported all my photos from Google Drive. It took Google a couple of days to get everything ready. Afterward, I downloaded around 15 zip files, each with a size of several gigabytes.
It was quite a task to unzip them all, perform deduplication, and import them into iCloud photos.
To keep them synced with S3, I am currently using an app called Photosync.
Just wait until you find out you don't have location data or the dates on photos from about 5 years are wrong. I think there's a reason the drive integration got shuttered.
Now that I think about it though, Takeout might include the location data until... they patch that "bug"to be more in line with the Photos API.
Sorry for this but on the off chance a single person anywhere near Photos sees this, your management chain is full of unrespectable scum. :) Gotta love Google.
I know you're (partly?) joking, but I'd gladly pay $20/mo for this kind of "cloud insurance policy" (on top of whatever trivial storage costs there are with each service).
