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Re:I only use Google Sheets by edoceo on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @08:53AM (#45437105)
Any good tools for automatic backup of these things? How would a non-tech-type do it?
Re:I only use Google Sheets by Aachen on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @11:00AM (#45438495)
There's sadly no silver bullet, especially for non-techies. To me it's like buying vegan products where available: I can't trivially become vegan with no effort, but I can affect market forces by preferentially buying things that align with that ideal. People could at least apply this where possible and buy products where they're in control somehow

For storage platforms like Dropbox or Onedrive, it can be as simple as ctrl+c'ing the data out of there every now and then

For Spotify, you can do the GDPR export and check that you can open it somehow. Even if it's not super readable, you can figure that out (with a tech friend or LLM perhaps) if you turn out to ever need it

For Signal, I've got no idea. The format is hard to work with for hardcore techies. They really really don't want you, ahem, attackers to get that data in the clear. (Two-sided coin). Make sure to turn on the backups, write down the passphrase, and take them off your phone every now and then, and hope there's a restore method when you need it

Re:I only use Google Sheets by raybb on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @02:11PM (#45441081)
Perhaps there's a market for this. An automated or semi-automated backup of many cloud services. It could probably be as simple as doing a gdpr request in some cases.
Re:I only use Google Sheets by zelphirkalt on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @05:01PM (#45443482)
That's not necessarily simple though, because some companies are shady and ass about it. And then if you want to pursue the matter, be ready to face significant effort needed to file a proper complaint in the correct channels for that.
Re:I only use Google Sheets by Aachen on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @09:40PM (#45445585)
Fwiw, GDPR has a forgotten clause that data exports need to also be provided in machine-readable format for easy service migrations and promoting competition / reducing vendor lock-in

The only reason I can imagine why nobody implements this, is that they like the status quo where it's hard to switch to their service, but equally hard to switch away. Once this becomes commonplace (e.g. because vendor A makes users aware it's a thing by implementing it for migrating from vendor B), vendor B will "retaliate" and A will have to truly be better than vendor B to retain said users

That is all to say, this might yet totally be a viable and legally unblockable business avenue for a third party to initiate. I'm just not sure there's enough demand to warrant (read: pay for) the effort involved. Maybe if you can have an LLM read the api docs of the service where you want to do the import and autogenerate a mostly-working version?

Re:I only use Google Sheets by flatcakes on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @08:59AM (#45437168)
This probably doesn't qualify as a non-tech type answer, but I have a Synology NAS which includes a feature (CloudSync?) to automatically download Google Drive documents in docx, xlsx, etc. format.
Re:I only use Google Sheets by umeshunni on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @12:34PM (#45439778)
Ooh - I have a Synology NAS and didn't realize it can convert files on sync.

It's also ironic that we're considering docx etc as open formats these days.