I’m working on a project where I need to find a particular folder in Google Drive and map out all its subfolders. After that, I want to pull down everything from the main folder but keep the same folder organization intact.
Has anyone done something like this before? I’m thinking about using Python for this task and would prefer to build it as a standalone desktop program rather than a web application. What would be the best approach to get started with the Google Drive API for this kind of folder traversal and download operation?
Any tips on handling the authentication and maintaining the directory structure during the download process would be really helpful.
been there! oauth setup’s tricky at first, but once you grab the credentials.json from google cloud console, it’s pretty straightforward. jack missed one thing tho - cache your folder mappings locally. hitting the api every time kills performance. i threw the tree structure in a simple json file between runs and it saved me tons of time.
I’ve built something similar for backing up company files from Drive. The main challenge is Google Drive’s folder structure - it’s not truly hierarchical like your local filesystem. It uses parent-child relationships that can get messy. For authentication in a desktop app, use OAuth2 flow with installed application credentials. Store the refresh token securely so users don’t have to re-authenticate constantly. The Google API Python client library does most of the work. For folder traversal, you’ll need to recursively query the API using the ‘parents’ parameter to build your folder tree. Watch out for rate limiting - the API has quotas so implement exponential backoff for retries. Also, files in Drive can have multiple parents, which might mess up your local structure. For downloads, create your local directory structure first, then pull the files. Use files.get with alt=‘media’ parameter for actual file content. Handle large files by streaming the download instead of loading everything into memory.
Hit some gotchas implementing this last year. The trickiest part? Files that exist in multiple folders - Drive allows this but your filesystem doesn’t. I used symlinks on Linux/Mac and shortcuts on Windows to keep these relationships intact. Google Docs and Sheets were another headache since they don’t have real file formats in Drive. You’ll need the export endpoints to convert them - PDF or DOCX work well. For folder traversal, use pageToken on large directories or you’ll hit timeouts. Also recommend a manifest file tracking what you’ve downloaded and when. Makes resuming failed downloads way easier. Threading downloads helped performance a ton, but don’t hammer the API quotas.