Drive Backup

A simple way to backup your Google Drive locally.

Introduction

If you need to backup your Google Drive this is exactly the tool for you. It will fetch the files and folders you want to backup from your Google Drive and store them locally.

Notable Features

• Supports backing up either your entire Google Drive or a specific directory.
• Efficient, Drive Backup will first check if a file it wants to download was already downloaded in a previous backup.
• Works through Google Drive API which uses OAuth 2.0 and sends all data securely over HTTPS.
• Supports both Mac, Windows, & Linux.
• Emits a notification when complete or when there is a problem (Mac & Windows only).
• Choose between 3 backup types:
  • complete
    • Creates a new backup, leaving previous backup untouched.
  • increment
    • Creates a new backup, moving files that have not changed since the previous backup into the new backup, and leaving only old files remaining in the previous backup.
  • update
    • Update the previous backup in-place with the latest changes from your Google Drive.
• Convert Google Document files (Docs, Sheets, Slides) into their corresponding MS Office type or to PDF.
• Supports shortcuts in your Google Drive. It will treat a shortcut like a separate file each time it encounters one.
• Creates a log file with every backup so you can verify all your files were downloaded or check for errors to get information why something went wrong or didn’t download.
• Saves the configuration for each backup in a bkp file so you can easily run the same backup multiple times.

Installation

Drive Backup requires Python version 3.11 or higher.

There are a few different ways to install Drive Backup. Depending on your setup/need a different approach is recommended.

Via pipx

If pipx is installed, it is the recommended way of installing Drive Backup.

pipx install drive-backup

Via Prebuilt Binaries

The prebuilt binaries are the next easiest way to get up and running. A unique benefit of the prebuilt binaries is the ability to place them wherever you like. If you are storing your files on an external drive, it may be covenient to also store the binaries there. That way, you could connect the external drive to any computer (…that you trust of course) and be able to easily backup from it.

Download the prebuilt binaries from the latest release.

Via git clone

After cloning the repo make sure to install the project with poetry (poetry install). If you don’t have poetry installed on your system you can find info on how to install it on their docs. From this point it is like any other poetry project:

poetry run dbackup ...

Usage

The first time Drive Backup is ran (or whenever there is no valid user signed in), a browser window will open asking you to sign in to Google and to give Drive Backup permission to download files from Google Drive.

Important

When Drive Backup requests your permission to access your Google Drive Files, you will see a warning screen informing you “Google hasn’t verified this app”. This doesn’t mean the app is actually dangerous, just that it is not verified. This is currently unavoidable unfortunately. For more info on why this is happening see the App Verification section below.

Below are some common examples to show how Drive Backup works. To see more info about all of the options and commands run dbackup -h or dbackup [command] -h .

Backup your entire Google Drive into the current directory. Drive Backup will make a directory in your current directory titled Google Drive Backup {date} where date is the current date.

dbackup backup

Backup your entire Google Drive into a specific directory titled my-backups:

dbackup backup -d my-backups

Backup only the directory on Google Drive called Vacation Photos into my-backups and run an update type backup.

dbackup backup -d my-backups -t update --source "Vacation Photos"

If you wanted to rerun a previous backup, you can pass in the backup config file from that backup and all the same settings will be used. By default the drive-backup.bkp file from a backup is stored in the destination directory.

As an example, lets say more photos were added to our Vacation Photos directory on Google Drive and we want to back them up. We don’t need to use the -t or --source options again, just -c.

dbackup backup -c my-backups/drive-backup.bkp

When downloading many files, the log can get cluttered with both Drive Backup’s logging of file info and the underlying Google library’s logging of download info. For this reason it may be desirable to only log messages from Drive Backup and filter out the rest.

dbackup backup --log-filter

Similarly, you may only want to record logs of files that need to be downloaded, not files that are already present (or in other words, not files that were downloaded on a previous backup).

dbackup backup --log-changes

You can sign out of your account so you can sign into a different Google account.

dbackup user sign-out

You can also check which user is currently logged in.

dbackup user info

App Verification

Drive Backup needs your permission to access your Google Drive files and folders. To do this, Drive Backup identifies itself to Google with an application client credential. You are then shown a webpage from Google, asking for your permission to allow Drive Backup the access it is requesting.

Due to how Google has recently decided to handle verifying client apps, it was not possible for me to have Drive Backup verified. It would cost $500+ each year to be verified. Unfortunately, I am not willing/in a position to pay them that amount of money to verify a free app.

The good news here is that Drive Backup will still function as it should even though it is not verified. However, when you are prompted to give the app permission to access your Google Drive, you will be met with a scary window that contains the following:

I can tell you that this app is not dangerous and will not do anything nefarious with your Google Drive data or any data on your computer. It also doesn’t collect any info from you. But, since all the source code is open source and availble for you to check out, you don’t have to take my word for that.

To proceed through the permission request process and allow Drive Backup access to Google Drive, click on “Advanced” and then “Go to Drive Backup (unsafe)”. This will bring you to the page where you can allow Drive Backup to have access.

I do hope none of this deters you from using Drive Backup, as it is a very useful tool that I use myself. If you don’t want to use the built in app credential that ships with the app, you can look into generating your own client credential and use that instead. With this you can be even more certain Drive Backup only has the permissions it needs (i.e. Google Drive Read access).

Custom Client Credentials

If you are having problems with Drive Backup and are hitting download limits, you can supply your own client credentials. To generate your own, check out the Authorize credentials for a desktop application section on the Google Drive Python API Guide page. Once you have followed the steps and downloaded the json file, pass it into Drive Backup with the --client-credentials flag when you run a backup. Now Drive Backup will use your client credentials instead of the default one that ships with the app. Note that this will get stored in the backup config bkp file, so if you are repeating a backup with --backup-config you don’t need to explicitly pass the custom client credential each time.

dbackup backup --client-credentials path/to/your/personal/credentials.json

Privacy Policy

Check out Drive Backup’s Privacy Policy.

Copyright and License

Google Drive is a trademark of Google Inc. Use of this trademark is subject to Google Permissions.

2024 George Waters under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

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