How to Create Copies of a Google Docs Collection

by Bibiano Wenceslao on June 16, 2012 Work Hacks 10 Comments

Yesterday after writing a number of documents and grouping them into collections and subcollections, I thought I should make a backup of everything since I’ll be sharing those files with other people. To my surprise, Google Docs simply can’t do that. Even making copies of several documents seemed to be very tedious (imagine a hundred files) considering each had to be individually opened before getting access to the File menu where you’ll find the Make a copy option.

No copy functionality for collections? Okay.

I tried to google on how to create backups of Google Docs files in the cloud and to no avail only found these two Google Product Forums threads being the closest to my query, but both still left unsolved as of this writing. Downloading the whole collection, renaming it, and uploading it back? Maybe the GDocs team already has this functionality set for the next update.

To cut the supposed-to-be short story shorter (I’m sorry you had to read through my harrowing narrative), I realized I’ve installed Google Drive locally on my machine. Then remembering that all my Google Docs files in the cloud have been moved to Drive and that everything would just sync ala Dropbox…Eureka! Come, let’s jump right into the process.

Google Drive Installation and Signing In

Make sure you already have Google Drive installed locally on your machine. If not, you can download the application installer here. Run the Google Drive app (or maybe it already is and just being snuggy by the notification area on your taskbar), and sign in with your Google account that has the doc collections you want to make copies of.

Setup and Syncing

A setup window should appear and you’ll have the option to set where you want to place your Google Drive folder locally. If you don’t have that too many documents, everything should quickly sync up right after the setup. You’ll know it’s still syncing when you see the icon being shiny (I really don’t know how to exactly describe it – my vocabulary is bad, and I should feel bad). Right-click on it and select Open Google Drive folder. You should see a folder window similar to the one shown below.

Copying and Re-syncing

Now select the collection you wish to backup. Do a copy-and-paste combo within the same window to create a duplicate of the selected collection.

For a big amount of data, you might have to wait for a few minutes for the re-syncing to finish.

At times you might encounter an error notification as shown below telling you that some files can’t be synced. I think this happens when the collection you’re trying to duplicate contains documents that you don’t own (just shared with you). I can’t be sure enough but you won’t be experiencing this if you’re copying files that you own yourself.

When re-syncing’s done, you can then rename your new collection here or just do it in the cloud app. You may go check the new copy of your Google Docs collection in the cloud.

Hurray! Hope this helped you as well. Hey, you might know people who’s been scratching their heads about the same problem too. That’s another way of me saying it would be great if you’d share this with others. Haha.

Related Links

• How to Move/Copy Google Docs/Drive Files Between Free and/or Google Apps Accounts

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Tags:   Google Docs

This post was last modified on April 28, 2013.

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