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Use cases → Documents and Drive

Mass-rename shared drives with delegated automation

Rename hundreds of shared drives in production by impersonating admins and updating drive names directly, without manual intervention or bulk export/import.

Who it is forWorkspace admins and IT operations handling large-scale drive reorganisations.
APIsDrive API
Typical scopesdrive

The problem

When an organisation restructures, shared drive names need to reflect new teams, projects, or compliance rules. Manual renaming is error-prone, slow, and often incomplete, especially with hundreds of drives spread across business units. There's no native bulk rename tool in the admin console, so admins waste hours on repetitive tasks.

How it works

  1. Use a delegated service account with the 'drive' scope and impersonate an admin user.
  2. List all shared drives using the Drive API, filtering by the current names or metadata.
  3. Apply the new naming scheme according to a mapping or programmatic rule.
  4. Update each drive name with drives.update for the corresponding shared drive ID.
  5. Log all changes, including failures, for audit and rollback purposes.

What changes

Shared drives reflect the new structure in minutes instead of days, with a full audit trail and no risk of typos or omissions from manual entry.

The trap in this one. Drive API update operations on shared drives are eventually consistent: renames may not propagate instantly to all users or the admin console, and subsequent API reads can return stale names for several minutes. This means a follow-up verification pass can report false negatives, leading to repeated updates or confusion over which drives were actually renamed. Always allow for propagation delays before validating or triggering dependent workflows.

Questions people ask

Does this affect drive permissions or contents?

No, only the display name of the shared drive changes. Permissions, files, and membership remain untouched.

Can I undo a rename if something goes wrong?

Yes, as long as you keep a mapping of original names and drive IDs. You can revert names with another update pass using the Drive API.

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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