You have heard of Google Docs, the online office suite from Google, but you may not have heard that you can take it offline. That’s right, with a little browser plugin, called Google Gears, you can make your Google Docs available offline in your browser. Need to work on an article at 30,000 feet? Use Google Docs offline. Need to edit your resume while luxuriating on the beach? Use Google Docs offline.

One of the best things about Google Docs offline is that you do not need to use a separate program or application. You can open up your web browser, type in http://docs.google.com, and you’re off to the races. It is so easy and so powerful, it all just seems like magic.

Google Docs offline is not magic, however, and with all due respect to the amazing Google engineers, it may all be too easy to access your Google Docs from your laptop. In fact, I will show you how you can view any one’s full Google Docs document collection (as long as you have physical access to their machine - yeah - I realize that’s a big hurdle) with a free database utility and a little bit of know-how.

Why is this useful? Outside of general hacking, knowing how to view an individual’s offline Google Docs could make an impact on E-Discovery (the process of asking for and delivering electronic data during litigation). Many times E-Discovery ignores “personal” data, such as Google Docs documents. But now that it is so easy to obtain such data, litigators may no longer choose to ignore it. Without further ado and in four easy steps:

• Identify if a Google Docs offline database is in use
  • Run the following dir command on a windows machine:
    • dir c:\*#database /s
    • Note each resulting database - these are Google Gears databases
• Download the free database viewer
  • http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/
• Open the offine database with the viewer
  • Open the Sqlite Viewer and view each of the files from the dir command in step #1
• Select the proper table and happy viewing
  • In the *Documents#database, look at the DocumentData table
  • Here’s an example of how clearly you can see your documents:
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