Downloading Google Docs Document

Apparently its just a shortcut to your actual file.

Interesting.

Is this for a fact that data parts are in different locations? different datacentres? I accept that file might be multiplied in different locations for redundancy.

Would that not cause delay to "assemble" the file to presentation?

By location, I wasn't necessarily referring to physical location, just different types or instances of storage. I have no knowledge of the actual backend, but a basic example could be that they have all the text content of the document in an actual file, but all of the styling information (font size, italics etc) could be stored in a database. When a request is made for the 'document', Google's services pull from both those sources to combine the data into something that the browser can present to the user.

That's a massively simplified version. In reality, there could be any number of interconnected services required to produce what the user sees. The point is that there is no single file that contains all the information required to display it. You have to export it to a format that does contain all that information in a single place

Save it as a pdf.

That's it