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Use cases → Documents and Drive

Automate backup of critical shared drives via delegation

Use a service account with domain-wide delegation to systematically back up shared drives, avoiding manual errors and missed data.

Who it is forIT teams responsible for safeguarding business-critical shared content.
APIsDrive API
Typical scopesdrive.readonly

The problem

Relying on users or admins to manually back up shared drives leads to incomplete coverage and inconsistent schedules, risking permanent data loss if something is deleted or corrupted.

How it works

  1. Grant the service account delegated read access to all shared drives of interest.
  2. Enumerate shared drives and their contents recursively on a defined schedule.
  3. Download new and changed files since the last backup, storing them in immutable storage.
  4. Track file IDs and versions to support incremental backups and deduplication.

What changes

Backups run reliably to schedule, with consistent coverage across all targeted shared drives and a clear audit trail of what was backed up and when.

The trap in this one. Drive API will silently omit files and folders if the backing group or user permissions haven't fully propagated, especially right after a drive is created or membership changes. This means your backup may miss new or recently moved content without any warning. Always re-scan drives for changes after permission updates, or you risk silent data gaps.

Watch it explained

“How To Get a Google Drive API Key” — SelfScope on YouTube. Third-party video, included because it covers this ground well. We are not affiliated with the channel.

Questions people ask

How do I avoid backing up trashed or deleted files?

Filter out files with the 'trashed' property set to true. Note that permanently deleted files are unrecoverable and won't appear in the listing.

How do I handle large drives efficiently?

Use the 'pageToken' mechanism to paginate through contents, and parallelise downloads where possible, but throttle requests to avoid quota errors.

Want this built?

This is a pattern we run in production. We will set up the delegation and build this on top of it — $500 per hour, most of it working the same day.

Talk to us Or read the setup guide

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