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In Google Drive I have ~130 documents with links to other documents in the same folder. I want to copy the folder and share it with a third party without needing to manually update all the links.

When I copy a folder containing linked files, the links don't update.

For example,

  1. oldFolder contains two documents docA and docB
  2. oldFolder\docA contains a link to oldFolder\docB
  3. I make a copy of oldFolder called newFolder
  4. newFolder now contains newFolder\docA and newFolder\docB
  5. The link in newFolder\docA however doesn't point to newFolder\docB but instead still points to oldFolder\docB

Other than manually changing all the links is there a way to copy the folder so that the relative links between the documents are maintained?

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  • Welcome to Web Applications. If this question is about Google Drive, it should have the tag google-drive
    – Rubén - Volunteer Moderator - ♦
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 20:28
  • The docs are linked by unique ID, unlike relative links in local filesystems. Any solution will need to be able to parse the content of all the docs in the folder prior to copying to extract doc IDs from links, as well as a separate list of the IDs of the docs themselves. Following copy it will need to be able to map the new doc IDs back to the old doc IDs, and then update any of the parsed links in the new docs based on that mapping.
    – Blindspots ♦
    Commented Aug 13, 2023 at 5:20

1 Answer 1

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TL;DR: There are no built-in functions to do this.

Options

Add-ons

Click in Extensions > Get add-on or go to the Google Workspace Marketplace to search for add-on.

Google Apps Script

You might use Google Apps Script. This platform helps users automate Google Drive and Google Docs, among other things. One of the advantages is that it includes services that make it easier to handle authorization and handling of files and content, so the time to get to speed might be lower than using other options for those that feel comfortable with programming and JavaScript and the best is that it will not be necessary to give access to your data to third parties.

Low code / no code automation tools

Many low code / no code automation tools offer to automate tasks in apps like Google Drive and Google Docs. IFTTT, Make.com, Zapier are some of them.

Google APIs

Google Drive and Google Docs have APIs that allow people to use their programming skills to automate these apps.

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