Coming Soon: Import Directly From Google Drive
Right now, moving files from Google Drive into LifetimeCloud means exporting with Google Takeout, downloading the archive, extracting it, and uploading the result. We're building a way to skip most of that: a direct Drive import, connected from inside your vault. It's in active development — not live yet — and this is what it's meant to do.
What it's meant to remove
The Takeout route works, but it has friction: you wait for Google to assemble the export, download potentially large archive files to local disk, extract them, and then upload the result — often the same data crossing your connection twice. A direct import is meant to connect to your Drive, list what's there, and bring it into your encrypted vault without that detour through a local download first.
Where things stand today
This feature exists in an internal test environment and is still being worked on — we're refining how it handles things like Google Docs/Sheets conversion, large libraries, and partial-failure recovery (what happens if the connection drops halfway through a big import). It is not available in the live product yet, and we're deliberately not attaching a ship date to it: we'd rather release it once it's solid than rush it out and have it half-work for people migrating years of files.
What won't change: how encryption works
Whatever the final import flow looks like, it doesn't change our encryption model. Files still get encrypted in your browser before they're stored — a direct import has to fetch the file content client-side and encrypt it locally, the same as a manual upload does today, rather than having our servers touch your files in plaintext at any point. A faster import path is a convenience feature, not a shortcut around zero-knowledge encryption.
What we're aiming for, roughly
| Goal | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Connect once, list your Drive contents | Skip the export/download detour for a first migration |
| Handle Docs/Sheets/Slides conversion automatically | Today that's a manual choice you make before exporting with Takeout |
| Resume cleanly after an interruption | A large library shouldn't have to restart from zero if a connection drops |
| Encrypt client-side, same as any upload | A faster path in, not a different security model |
None of that is a finished feature list — it's the direction the internal build is currently headed, and it may change as testing surfaces real problems we didn't anticipate. That's the point of testing it before promising it.
What you can do in the meantime
Until this ships, the Takeout route is fully supported and works well for one-time migrations — most people moving a Drive library only need to do it once, so a slightly more manual process today isn't a real obstacle. We've written a step-by-step guide to exporting from Drive and uploading the result into your vault, folder structure intact, and a broader migration checklist if you're moving more than just files.
Migrating today doesn't mean waiting for tomorrow's tools.
The manual export-and-upload route works now, and every file still lands encrypted, client-side, before it reaches us.
See current plans →