Google-drive – Export Google Drive Including Shared Folders

exportfile-sharinggoogle-drive

I want to download all files from my Google Drive including folders and documents which were shared with me.

  • The problem is, whenever I use google Takeout it skips the shared
    elements.
  • Using the Desktop app to download all the files is not a solution
    either, since it doesn't convert the Google Documents to
    Microsoft-Office Documents.
  • last solution (even though it would loose the folder structure – since I dragged all the shared elements into my drive) was to manually download all shared elements by selecting all of them under the "shared with me"-section and using the download button under "more actions". However, this is not a solution either, since some files extent the max. size limit…

How can I download/export all the files while preserving the folder structures, including shared elements and converting Google Documents to Microsoft-Office Documents?

EDIT:
A way to go/loop through each Google Document file automatically, which saves them as Microsoft-Office Documents next to the original files in the same folder would help as well! Then the Desktop app could do the rest.

Best Answer

I would try the following:

  1. Create a new folder in your Google Drive to move all your shared items into.
  2. Go to "Shared with Me" and add all the shared items from there to the new folder in your drive.
  3. Perform an export through Takeout and this should include the new folder you just made with all the shared items you added to it.

When I tested this manually, the shared items added to my drive did show up in the Takeout export.

If this doesn't work or you want to avoid having to add all your "Shared with Me" items to your drive, an alternative solution could be to use the rclone command line tool. Currently, it looks like the beta version of rclone supports accessing items from the "Shared with Me" section of the drive. rclone can then be used to download all these files and also supports downloading Google documents in more portable file formats (rclone defaults to using the docx, xlsx, pptx, and svg formats).

I don't think the existing answer here (which suggests downloading through the web interface) would work because, as mentioned in the question, certain files could hit the max size limit and then fail to download.

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