There is a service called Google Takeout which lets you do a full data dump of Drive and any other google product.

But allegedly can’t export google slides of any significant size.

It's also highly manual (at least for local backups). One can only set up backups for six months at a time, plus downloading the files involves waiting for an email notification and using download links in that email.

If anyone has figured out a way to automate all this, I'd _love_ to hear about it.

I back up my gdrive to a synology, which is in turn backed up to rsync.net. The notifications get fed into checkcentral. This arrangement is pretty capable and I feel good about it.

I've been thinking of going full archivist and burning all the family photos onto blurays though.

I have a full sync of my cloud storage on my media PC, which rsync's nightly to an external drive. I have another external drive that lives at work, which I bring home and sync every month or so. In theory I think that covers most scenarios I care about (cloud provider failure, HDD failure, house fire etc).

It has been a long time since I used Drive, so I can't remember if has a Dropbox-like desktop sync app, so this may not apply.

Does rsync replicate or ignore file deletion?

It depends on what flags you call it with - it can do either.

Surely, but in your setup?

I have it mirror deletes. I'm comfortable enough with this because my cloud storage provider has version history and deleted file restoration, plus my air-gapped month-old backup gives me some time to notice any accidental deletes.

I used to have it not mirror deletes, but then if you ever have to do a full restore it's a bit of a mess.

As another user suggested, backing up your cloud storage to another provider is important. with S3-like object lock ideally.

rclone is awesome :)

The most you can do is backup the files and save them on a physical drive or another online cloud service.

Use local synology NAS + Synology C2 cloud. By doing this you will have a solid system.