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Use cases → Documents and Drive

Enforce document expiry across all Drive content

Automatically expire or restrict access to documents after a set period, without relying on manual user action.

Who it is forIT administrators and compliance teams in regulated or data-sensitive organisations.
APIsDrive API
Typical scopesdrive

The problem

Documents accumulate indefinitely, exposing sensitive or outdated information long after it's needed. Manual clean-up is unreliable and users rarely set expiry dates.

How it works

  1. Scan all Drive files using a delegated service account with domain-wide access.
  2. Identify files by creation date, last modified date, or custom metadata indicating expiry.
  3. Apply an expiry policy by revoking external sharing, removing permissions, or moving files to a quarantine folder.
  4. Notify owners where required, logging actions for audit.

What changes

Data retention policies are enforced at scale, reducing risk from lingering documents and accidental oversharing.

The trap in this one. Drive API changes to file sharing or permissions can take several minutes to propagate, especially for large shared drives or folders with inherited permissions. This means a file may appear to still be accessible externally for a short period after automation runs, and scripts relying on immediate state changes can produce inconsistent audit logs or trigger false alerts. Always re-check permissions after a delay if your compliance depends on timing.

Questions people ask

Can expiry be set retroactively on all existing files?

Yes, but you must iterate through every file, and for large tenants this can hit API rate limits. Stagger jobs and use incremental processing.

Does this affect files owned by shared drives?

Yes, but only if the service account has content manager or higher access to those drives. Shared drive permissions can behave differently from My Drive.

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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