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In our company we have some files on Google Drive which I share with different people using a share link. Company policy dictates that shares, passwords,... need to be changed regularly to decline access to employees who have been fired, left, retired and so on.
Right now, what I do is make a copy of these files, rename them and share the newly created copies.
However, this feels very devious and I can hardly believe there isn't a better way for this.
Stop sharing the file and then sharing it again leaves me with the same share link as before, so this isn't a solution.

So my question in short: What is the fastest way to change the share link of a file in Google Drive?

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  • The link is based on the doc's "id" so I don't think that you can change it without duplicating it.
    – AccioBooks
    Commented Feb 11, 2016 at 3:36
  • Yeah, it's quite ridiculous that you cannot change the Shareable Link url. You can disable it, but if you re-enable it, you'll get the same url as before. The reason is because the Shareable Link is simply just the file/folder's ID. It seems pretty obvious that they could have just appended a key=... in the parameter, and that key variable can be revoked or changed.
    – wisbucky
    Commented Jul 29, 2018 at 20:28

1 Answer 1

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There is no way to change the link of a file in Google Drive, but you could create set expirations dates. For details see Set expiration dates for access to Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides files

If you are using Google Apps for Work or other similar edition, share your files with people from the same domain, so when their accounts get suspended, they will lose the access to the files.

If you are using a consumer account, create a Google Groups group, add the people that you want to give access to the files as members, and share the files to the group's email address. Then, when someone leave the organization, remove that member from the group.

Another alternative is create a copy of the file which will have a new link, then you could unshare the old file.

Note: The copy will not include the change/version history and comments from the original.

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