Solved: How do shortcuts work when migrating documents fro... - Page 2

b_gorsky1 · 12-08-2022 10:16 AM

I am curious to know how the relatively new Shortcuts in Drive function works when we upload files/folders from our on-premise file server to Google Shared Drives. Does Drive scan for duplicated and automatically create shortcuts? If so, what criteria does it use to confirm that a file is truly a duplicate and not a different version of the same file?

For example, we have a folder that contains over 100 sub-folders. It is not uncommon for a file that is named the same to be in multiple sub-folders. However, there can be differences in the file content such as text being highlighted or not. We want to retain all of these variations and I am concerned that Google may replace many instances of a file with the same name with shortcuts, effectively causing us to lose different versions of the same file that we need to keep in specific folders.

I know that Drive automatically replaced duplicated files with shortcuts when they introduced the shortcuts feature.

b_gorsky1

My testing confirms that my original concern is unwarranted. Everything I've uploaded, has remained as is and no shortcuts have been created. I had also opened a ticket with Google Support and was told the following:

After reviewing the information provided previously, I see you have uploaded multiple copies of the same file, even-though they have the same name these files are not the same if you check the URL of each copy you will see that they have a different ID. Having this into consideration the answer to your question "will Drive replace all but one of them with shortcuts automatically?" the answer is, no because they are not the same file.

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How do shortcuts work when migrating documents from on prem file server to shared drives?