Google-drive – Duplicates files in Google Drive

google-drive

I recently put all my files in Google Drive on my desktop and my laptop.

When I started syncing files, i found out there was twice as much data as it was before only to see all folders being duplicates…

I think it's because my 2 computers sent all the files at the same time (as both folders on both computers were mirors exept for the timestamp of the files)

Is there a way to do a smart merge and remove duplicates?

Best Answer

Short Answer

At this time Google Drive doesn't include a way to automatically identified and/or remove duplicated files.

Alternatives

Go to http://superuser.com and/or to http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com to get help finding a third party app.

References

Google Drive Help

Related Solutions

Google-drive – How to you restrict a user from deleting Google Drive documents they are shared on

Giving edit access to Google Drive documents is sufficient. The way these files work, once they are shared with a user, the file will appear in their "Shared with me" list

If they remove or delete a file from this list, it will not remove the document from any other user's list, nor will it destroy the file. Only the owner can trash a document.

Learn more about trashing documents here: http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2494934&p=restore_trash_collab

If the owner trashes a document, they can get it back from their Trash folder:

Learn how to recover a file or folder that you moved to the trash.

If something in Google Drive is moved to the trash, you'll see a warning and you may lose access to it at any time. Read one of the following sections to learn how to restore it to your Google Drive from the trash. When you restore something, it'll be recovered in Google Drive on the web, to the Google Drive folder on your computer, and to your mobile devices.

If the item is in a folder, you’ll need to restore the entire folder to recover any individual items inside of it.

Owners

If you're the owner of something and you’ve placed it in the trash, you'll see a warning that reads "This item is in your trash" when you open the doc or file.

If you’d like to restore a doc or file to your Google Drive:

Search for it in the Trash. Select the file(s) or doc(s) you’d like to recover. Click the Restore button.

Folders and file structures behave the same way, if regular editors remove these it will disappear from their "Shared with me" list but it only affects them, not the rest of the collaborators.

Google Drive – How to Recursively Set Ownership of Files and Folders

I created a command-line tool to handle this.

After following the setup instructions on the GitHub project, you can run the tool with a specified path prefix and the email address of the new owner:

python transfer.py PATH-PREFIX NEW-OWNER-EMAIL

After getting authorization from OAuth, it will recursively walk the Google Drive account it got authorization to, match against the path prefix (ignoring non-matches), and then transfer ownership to the new email. If the new email address indicates a user who isn't even shared on the item yet, it will handle that as well. The current owner will not lose access, but the new or old owner can revoke it.

I should note that it's not always possible to transfer ownership of an item in Drive. For example, it's not possible to move ownership for an item from G Suite (Google Apps for Work) account to a normal GMail account. It can be shared (which the script will do), but ownership transfer will fail.