Working with Google Drive Shortcuts

This article describes how to work with Google Drive Shortcuts in Datto SaaS Protection for Google Workspace.

Environment

  • Datto SaaS Protection for Google Workspace

Description

Shortcuts in Google Drive are a way to organize and refer to content in other locations. Users can create shortcuts to items in their own drive or in shared drives. Datto SaaS Protection now backs up and restores shortcuts as part of your Google Drive backup.

Shortcuts in Datto SaaS Protection

Shortcuts will appear in your backup snapshots with an arrow icon. You can select the checkbox next to a shortcut to affect it individually, or include it in a multiple-item operation.

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Restore behavior

Google allows only single-parent ownership of files and folders.

Due to this limitation, Datto SaaS Protection has updated restore functionality for files and folders that were previously multi-parent.

Datto SaaS Protection 1.0

  • Shortcuts are not supported
  • All users with existing permissions, besides the single parent user, will lose access. Once the restore is complete, you can create new shortcuts in your Google environment.

Datto SaaS Protection

  • The system will restore files and folders that were shortcuts when the backup was taken as shortcuts.
  • Files and folders that had multiple parents in the snapshot before deprecation of this functionality will be restored to the most recently added parent (i.e. the first available location and user) and set as shortcuts for all other users.
  • All shortcut restores, successful or not, will have a storage size of 0 bytes.
  • You can restore Shortcuts to target files still accessible across Google Drives for which you currently have access permissions. You can also restore shortcuts to files that were moved to the trash.
  • If you try to restore a Shortcut to a target file that has been deleted, or from which your permissions were revoked, the restore will be skipped. The system will not count them in the restore count.

Shortcuts and exports

At this time, SaaS does not support the export of Google Shortcuts, because a shortcut is essentially a pointer to another file, and not a file itself. Google itself does not allow users to download Shortcuts from Google drive because they only exist within Google Drive as pointers to other files. You can, however, export the target of the shortcut if you know the location of the target file.

Additional Resources