I have several documents created using Google Docs. They are not plain text documents, but documents with images, tables, etc, etc.
How can I export this Google Document to my computer, such that I can import them back into Google Docs at a future date?
The only export options I see are .docx, .odt, .rtf, .pdf, .txt, and .html:
However these options are lossy. My documents are not byte-for-byte-equal after exporting and re-importing.
How can I losslessly export my Google Documents?
You can export Google Docs in their native format by appending export?format=kix to a Google Docs file link. However, even with the API, there's no way to re-import this file into docs at this time.
Many things have changed in Google Docs since this question was created back in 2014. As of July 2024, there isn't a way to get the document content to save it locally so that later, it can be used to recreate the document automatically.
Recently, Google Docs was updated to support markdown format.
Last year, Google Docs was updated to add a feature called eSignature.
The above are just a few changes introduced since this question was created that aren't included in an export/import job.
Google Apps Script and Google Documents API are not options for recapturing a document because neither supports all the features available through the Google Docs web app.
A feasible workaround for scenarios handling a few documents might be manually annotating and reproducing the unsupported features. One way to annotate the document is to use Comments (Insert > Comment), as some export formats like Microsoft Word (.docx) support them.
The previous answer mentioned URL parameters to export the document to "kix" format. AFAIK, this format is not publicly documented, so using it might require analyzing a document, including all the features used in the collections of documents to be exported, to evaluate how it can help recreate the documents.
