Office documents

ou have two options if you’re a Google Drive user: one for periodic downloads, which you’ll need to remember to do every so often if you don’t want to risk losing any data; and one for automatic downloads.

To manually download files, either use Google Takeout (see the Email section) or log in at drive.google.com and select the files you want to retrieve (hold ç while clicking to select several noncontiguous files, or hold ß to select several that sit side by side in the list), then click the ‘More actions’ button (the vertical dots on the toolbar above the file listing) and pick Download.

Get Google Drive contents

To automatically mirror the contents of Google Drive on your Mac, download InSync (insynchq.com). It costs $15 per Google account, but there’s a 15-day free trial before you have to start paying. Once you’ve fed it your Google account details, it sets about downloading each of your documents to your Mac, placing them in a Google Drive folder inside your local user folder. You can drag this into the Finder sidebar to make it easier to find later.

Whenever you create a new document on Google Drive, InSync will copy it across and translate it into Microsoft Office formats, compatible with Pages, Keynote and Numbers. This allows you to edit them locally – not just on Google Drive. If you use Office 365 and save your files to OneDrive, sign in at onedrive.com and hover over any document you want to download and a checkbox will appear in its top-right corner. Check the box, then click the Download link. If you’ve selected several files they’ll be bundled together into a Zip and dropped into your Downloads folder.