Ever worry about losing access to your Google Drive? In this video, Geoff from geoffmobile.com shares exactly how he backed up his entire 280GB Google Drive onto two external hard drives.
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I’ll walk you through:
✅ Why Google Takeout beats manually copying files one by one
✅ The export settings that actually matter (so you don’t miss anything)
✅ Why your downloaded files won’t open — and how the free tool 7-Zip fixes that
✅ How I built a searchable index with Python + Gemini so I never have to dig through giant zip files again
✅ My two-drive backup strategy, so a single hard drive failure never costs me my data
🔗 Python script + CSV index: on my GitHub (link coming soon)
If you’ve got important files sitting in Google Drive, this is a weekend project worth doing.
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💬 Questions? Drop them in the comments — I read every one
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How to Back Up Your Google Drive to a Local Hard Drive
If you’ve been using Google Drive for years — especially if you’re on one of the paid plans with hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes stored — it’s worth keeping a local backup. Accounts can get locked or suspended for all sorts of reasons, and you don’t want your only copy of everything disappearing along with your Google account.
Here’s how I backed up my entire Google Drive (about 280 GB) onto two external hard drives, and how you can do the same.
Step 1: Get a couple of external drives
I picked up two 2 TB hard drives from Best Buy, about $174 CAD each. Keeping two copies means that if one drive fails, you’ve still got the other — the odds of both dying at once are pretty low. If your Google Drive is bigger than mine, size up accordingly; 5 TB or 7 TB drives aren’t unreasonable if you’ve got a lot of data.
Step 2: Export with Google Takeout instead of copying files manually
Rather than copying files one at a time, use Google Takeout — Google’s built-in tool for exporting your account data. Go to Google Takeout, sign in, click “unselect all,” then check just Google Drive. In the advanced options, make sure “include uploaded files” and “include extra file info” are both checked so nothing gets left out.
You’ll also pick a zip file size. A zip file is just an archive — a way of bundling many files together into one compressed package, which is much easier to download than thousands of individual files. Takeout will split your export into multiple zip files once you hit that size limit, so if your connection is fast, choose the largest option available (I used 50 GB per file) to end up with fewer, bigger archives.
Step 3: Install 7-Zip to actually open the files
Here’s the part that trips people up: these zip files won’t open normally through Windows Explorer or on a Mac — you’ll likely get an “invalid file” error. Windows 11’s built-in tools just can’t handle archives this large.
You’ll need 7-Zip, a free, open-source program for opening and managing zip files. Only get it from the official source (7-zip.org), or better yet, install it through winget — the Windows Package Manager, a built-in Windows tool for installing software from a trusted source. Fake “7-Zip” downloads floating around online are a common way people end up with malware, so it’s worth being careful here.
Once installed, open 7zFM.exe (the 7-Zip File Manager) to browse through the archives Takeout gave you.
Step 4: Build an index so you can find things later
With potentially hundreds of gigabytes split across dozens of zip files, tracking down one specific document later is a real problem. My fix: build an index — essentially a spreadsheet listing every file name, its folder path, and which zip archive it lives in.
I used Gemini to help write a Python script that scans through all the zip files and dumps that information into a CSV file — a plain-text spreadsheet format you can open in Excel. Now I can search the index first, find exactly which archive has the file I need, and pull out just that one file instead of unpacking an entire 50 GB zip to find a single PDF. I’ll be sharing the script on my GitHub soon.
Step 5: Duplicate it
Once everything’s downloaded to one drive, copy the whole folder over to the second drive so you end up with two identical backups. It’s worth setting a reminder to redo this every few months so your backup doesn’t get too stale.
That’s the whole process — a bit of setup, but it means your files are safe even if something goes wrong with your Google account. Questions? Drop them in the comments.
