How to Keep your Google Documents Secure

Google docs is a popular web based office application that comes by default with a Google account. If you are a student, working professional or a web worker then chances are that you use Google docs for creating and sharing documents with your colleagues, friends or use it in your day to day tasks while working in Internet.

If you have some important documents stored in Google account, you should take utmost care to secure them. And at least you should have a back up of all your Google documents periodically so that if something goes wrong you can still access them offline.(also read : How to save Gmail chats as a Google document)

So there are two major concerns with your Google documents security

1. Back up

2. Sharing and Collaboration

1. Back up Your Google documents on a regular basis

The good news is that Google docs now allows users to completely back up all the documents stored in their Google account. This includes Spreadsheets, presentations and Word documents. Following are the steps involved to back up all the Google documents in your computer :

1. Login to your Google account and select the documents that you want to back up.

2. Right click and select “Export”

3. Next, choose the format in which you wish to download the Google documents. For documents it supports PDF, RTF, Microsoft word, Html and plain text. For spreadsheets open office and Pdf formats are supported.

4. After that click on continue and Google docs will prepare the zip file containing all your documents for download. Once the file is ready, you can download all the Google documents in your computer and your back up process is complete.

Software : You can also try Gdoc Backup for backing up Google documents from desktop [Windows only].

2. Share the Documents Folder with another Email address

Back up is an important job but then again you may not be able to backup all your documents every now and then. A good idea would be to share all your documents with another email address so that if you lose control of your Google account, you can still access them from another Google account.

Here are the steps involved to sync your Google documents across multiple email addresses :

1. Login to Google docs and create a new folder. This folder will contain all your documents and will be synchronized with another email address of yours.

2. Move all the documents to the newly created folder.

3. Click the folder and you will have the sharing options for that folder. Just share that entire folder with another Google account of yours.

When you login to Google docs using the 2nd email address just browse to the Shared folder and you will be able to access all the documents stored inside your 1st Google account. This practice will automatically sync your Google documents with the 2nd email address so that you don’t lose the important documents.

Note : This process do not creates a backup. If you delete a document from the original Google account, you won’t be able to access it from the shared email address. it is just a precautionary measure and would be helpful if you lose access to your parent Google account. (also read: How to use Google docs as a blogging tool)

3. Some Google document Sharing tips

Only share your Google documents with people you trust. Do not share a document with an entire mailing list or a large group of friends.If you give other users the right to edit the document, then can subsequently invite other people to view as well as edit your document.

How to Stop others from editing your document

It’s pretty simple and easy. Following are the steps involved to stop other users from editing your document :

1. Open the document and click the share button. You would see the users who have editing rights in the current document.

2. Switch to the “Advanced permissions” tab. From here, just uncheck the checkbox “Allow editors to invite others to edit or view”. This would not allow other users to invite or edit your document.

This makes sure that only you can invite other people to view your document and edit it.

How to remove a User from viewing your document

Sometimes your documents may contain some confidential information that you do not want to disclose with your collaborators. In that case, it would be wise to completely remove a user from viewing your document. To achieve that, open the Google document and click the “Share” button. Switch to the “People with Access” tab.

Set the permission level to “None” and you are done. The user won’t be able to view the document anymore.

Need more tips and resources ? Consult the Google docs help center for more.