The only way I've seen is to have a POP/IMAP email account, and sync all the messages. A quick google search suggests that's still the case ("there's no easy way to backup a gmail account").
As a long time Google Docs user, this is great news.
We have learned time and time again that you shouldn't trust your data to one service, so easy exporting of your documents is a great feature, and should be done on a regular basis!
And if you want to automate it, Backupify.com can do regular backups to S3 from Google Docs and other online services. (Note: I have no affiliation except as a customer.)
I wish Google would just hurry up and buy or copy dropbox.
I don't want to make online backups of my offline data, offline backups of my online data & all that mess. I just want my docs in my dropbox folder, edited with Google docs, Zoho, Word, OO or a hammer n chisel and still available to any of the others when I'm done. No uploading/downloading a mess of files and recording them on tape. If I want another backup, I just want to plug in Time Machine. That's how I do backups. Other people like to do them differently (why? Time Machine works great), they should be able to do their thing.
I don't want to upload/download files via the browser. I don't want files called G.Docs-old-new-good-partial.zip sitting around everywhere. I don't want to think about my files. I especially don't want to think about my files if some of them or on my machine, some of them or on Google, some of them some startup's servers. That last one is a real problem because I need to read Techrunch to hear about them going under in advance and transfer all the files to whatever new startup they're covering.
The cloud isn't replacing the desktop today. No one uses only Google docs or stores documents only in the cloud. People do both. They might always do both. I want a bridge.
Yes.You can even use batch-export with batch upload to do a batch-PDF conversion ,absolutely Free of Cost!!!Upload files from your disk to a new folder and then batch-export them as PDF.
The only way I've seen is to have a POP/IMAP email account, and sync all the messages. A quick google search suggests that's still the case ("there's no easy way to backup a gmail account").
EDIT: yep http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail