Can I "unlink" a specific Google Drive's directory from Google Docs?

Question

I use Google Drive for many purposes, and one of them is backuping some stuff.

Unfortunately (for me) - I see all the documents in the 'backup' directory also in the Google Docs, which I don't really want to.

Is there any way to tell Google Docs to not read this directory?

This is what I do:

1. I have some directory on my local machine, it's called "backup" and it contains some .doc, .ods etc files.
2. I upload them to the google drive
3. Google Docs reads this directory and later I can see the files in Google Docs.

And I would love to stop the last thing - I don't want to see my 'backup' directory in Google Docs

Or maybe is there some kind of a trick, one which comes to my mind is to compress the entire 'backup' folder before uploading to the Google Drive, hoping that the service will not read it, but I would like to avoid that.

Answer 1

From the question:

Is there any way to tell Google Docs to not read this directory?

No. There is no setting for this on Google Documents, Google Drive, Google Account settings (Google help articles usually show what can be done, they very rarely include info about what can't be done and never include notes / warnings about "missing" settings ).

Regarding the "trick", it should work for "downloable" files but not for "native" Google Documents. For this kind of files, first you will have to convert the Google Docs files to "downloable" format first.

NOTE: Google Documents file format is not like PDF, DOCX, HTML file formats, it only works on the Google web servers. Google Drive for PC / Mac will show a link to the Google Documents files. If you compress that link the compress file will contain only the URL to the original file. In other words, if you completely delete the original file, the compressed file will not contain anything useful, just a URL to a file that doesn't exist anymore.

A workaround is to have a second account to be used to store your backups.