Google-drive – Is it possible to copy files from (Google Drive) Team Drive to My Drive

google-drivegoogle-shared-drive

(The following assumes using the web interface)

In Google Drive, if a user wants to make a copy of a file, they can drag it to a new location while holding the Control key (on Windows; possibly command on Mac); while Control is held down a little + (plus) symbol appears next to the pointer to indicate the users is copying rather than moving.

However, with Team Drives in the picture, this seems to break. I want a user to be able to copy a file out of a Team Drive into their 'My Drive'. If they try holding Control while dragging it across, the + sign appears, but then provides an error message that refers to moving rather than copying, as though the copy modifier is ignored. After the error message, a copy of the file is not present in the destination folder.

Since we have options to prevent most users from deleting files from Team Drives, selecting "Make a Copy" in the Drive UI doesn't work, as it makes a copy inside the current (Team Drive) folder, then the user is prevented from moving them into their My Drive.

If a user opens the file in the relevant app (e.g. Sheets), then selects "Make a Copy" they can make a copy into their own My Drive easily enough, so it's not a permissions problem, but rather the Drive Web UI seems to prevent this; if there are several files the user wants to copy this becomes quite painful to have to open each then copy.

Best Answer

If you can use the command line then rclone does the job. For detailed instruction you can visit https://rclone.org/drive/#team-drives.

For windows use Windows Subsystem for Linux or you can use mintty, both works great. Hope this helps!